Category: UNCATEGORIZED

What if Instagram could automatically tell you’re Close Friends you’re (home), (working), (on the move), or (chilling and might want to hang out)? That’s the idea behind Instagram’s new companion app Threads, a Close Friends-only messaging experience that opens to the camera with shortcuts for instantly sending specific people photos and videos. Threads offers two brand new features called Status and Auto-Status that allow you to manually set an emoji as an away message to show Close Friends what you’re up to, or opt in to letting Instagram select one automatically based on your location, accelerometer, and even your phone’s battery level.

Launching globally today on iOS and Android, this is Facebook and Instagram’s next big swing at Snapchat, specifically targeting its top use case: rapid-fire camera and text messaging with your best friends. Sick of randos in your inbox? Only people in your Instagram Close Friends list show up in Threads so you can trust its notifications are important. You can still just use Instagram Direct in the main app or the two in parallel, though.

What’s most unique is that Threads finally sees the launch the Facebook “Your Emoji” status feature we reported it was prototyping 18 months ago. Threads Status and Auto-Status offer conversation starters, contextual clues to why someone might not respond, and opportunities to meet up offline. But importantly, it leaves out a map or any exact location sharing to avoid being creepy and instead focus on what Close Friends are up to — which determines if they can chat or hang out more than where they are.

Threads offers “persistent connection”, Instagram’s Director of consumer product management Robby Stein tells me. It was designed with three priorities: the ability to “fully control who can reach you”, speed because “If most of your messages only go to a couple of people, why isn’t the expedience built around that?”, and “Having more of a connection through the data . . . even if you don’t have time for a conversation.”

By building Threads as a separate app, Instagram has little to lose if it flops and could learn about what features to pull back into its main app. But if it succeeds, Threads cement itself as where you stay in touch with your favorite people, while pigeonholing other messaging options like SMS, WeChat, as Snapchat as noisy channels full of unwanted alerts.

Close Friends Only

Social networks have an inevitable problem. Eventually out of coincidence and courtesy, you add too many people as friends, filling the apps with people who’s content you don’t care about and who’s messages you don’t always want. Facebook, the catch-all network for everything from family to bosses to acquaintances. That leads people to feel uncomfortable sharing too much, and to distrust that the notifications they get are important.

Now Instagram is doubling-down on Close Friends which launched last November at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to let you secretly set a special group of best pals who get to see special Stories you set as visible to only them. Facebook had tried complicated Lists products in the past and never seen them gain significant traction because it’s too tough to keep track of who’s in each. Instagram nailed the concept with a single list you edit as needed, though people don’t know if they’re added or removed. I’m surprised Facebook doesn’t already have its own Close Friends feature and it’d be smart to build one.

Close Friends creates the foundation for Threads. The only entries in your inbox are Close Friends, which you can edit in the app with the list syncing with your list on Instagram. You can hide any of those chats or group chats with exclusively close friends if you don’t want to see them.

When you open Threads, you’ll see open immediately to the camera like Snapchat. At the bottom are “Camera Shortcuts” that show friends’ faces you can tap on to send a photo or tap and hold for a video. You can also tap the “default camera” shutter and the select everyone you want to message. Swiping up reveals the Threads inbox, where you can tap into a conversation for a full-featured messaging experience just like in Instagram Direct.

SpaceX’s facility at Cape Canaveral just received a crucial new delivery: A Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule that it will be using for an upcoming in-flight abort test. This test, which will demonstrate the spacecraft and launch system’s ability to abort the launch mid-flight in case of any emergencies, is an important and necessary step before SpaceX can fly Crew Dragon with any actual people on board.

This test will replicate a ‘worst case scenario’ of sorts, by staging a crew capsule separation at the point of ‘Max Q,’ which is the part of the launch where the rocket is exposed to the most severe atmospheric forces prior to making it to space. At this point during the abort test, the Crew Dragon will show that it can detach from the Falcon 9 rocket and propel itself away to a safe distance in order to protect the astronauts on board.

Back in 2015, SpaceX completed the lead-up to this, which was a pad abort test that demonstrated the escape process in case the mission needs to be canceled earlier, before the spacecraft has left the launch pad. Earlier this year, SpaceX was conducting an abort test for its SuperDraco rocket engine for Crew Dragon when an error caused an explosion that destroyed the capsule. Since that was supposed to be the capsule used for this in-flight test, SpaceX had to finish manufacturing a new one before this test could take place.

Now that the rocket and capsule are both at the Cape, the test shouldn’t be that far off. That’s great news for SpaceX, which is still targeting the end of this year for its first crewed demonstration flight for Crew Dragon – though even the company’s own leadership has indicated that’s an increasingly difficult target to hit given where we’re at in the year.

Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder at Harness, has always been frustrated by the lack of tools to measure software development team performance. Harness is a tool that provides Continuous Delivery as a Service, and its latest offering, Continuous Insights, lets managers know exactly how their teams are performing.

Bansal says a traditional management maxim says that if you can’t measure a process, you can’t fix it, and Continuous Insights is designed to provide a way to measure engineering effectiveness. “People want to understand how good their software delivery processes are, and where they are tracking right now, and that’s what this product, Continuous Insights, is about,” Bansal explained.

He says that it is the first product in the market to provide this view of performance without pulling weeks or months of data. “How do you get data around what your current performance is like, and how fast you deliver software, or where the bottlenecks are, and that’s where there are currently a lot of visibility gaps,” he said. He adds, “Continuous Insights makes it extremely easy for engineering teams to clearly measure and track software delivery performance with customizable, dashboards.”

Harness measures four key metrics as defined by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) in their book Accelerate. These include deployment frequency, lead time, mean-time-to-recovery and failure change rate. “Any organization that can do a better job with these would would really out-innovate their peers and competitors,” he said. Conversely companies doing badly on these four metrics are more likely to fall behind in the market.

By measuring these four areas, it not only provides a way to track performance, he sees it as a way to gamify these metrics where each team tries to outdo one another around efficiency. While you would think that engineering would be the most data-driven organization, he says that up until now it has lacked the tooling. He hopes that Harness users will be able to bring that kind of rigor to engineering.

Lyft is rolling out rewards for its drivers to give them access to things like cash bonuses, ride credits, and free or discounted tax services. Initially, the rewards program will be available to drivers in Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Nashville, New Orleans, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

Drivers earn points for every eligible dollar earned while they drive during their respective city’s busiest hours. From there, drivers can redeem the points for cash bonuses and Lyft rider credits.

For drivers with a 90% or higher acceptance rate who have a rating of at least 4.9 (Platinum or Gold), they have access to exclusive features. That includes the ability to see the estimated length of trip time and direction before they accept the ride.

Those who reach Platinum status can claim a monthly AT&T phone plan credit, a Lyft direct debit card with 5% cash back on all gas prices, free 24/7 roadside assistance from AllState and free Turbo Tax for self-employed workers.

In November, Uber launched a rider loyalty program. That same month, Uber unveiled Uber Pro, a rewards program for drivers in ten cities. Since then, Uber has rolled out Pro to an additional 20 markets.

This comes shortly after gig worker bill AB 5 was signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom.

AB-5 will help to ensure gig economy workers are entitled to minimum wage, workers’ compensation and other benefits by requiring employers to apply the ABC test. The bill, first introduced in December 2018, aims to codify the ruling established in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v Superior Court of Los Angeles. In that case, the court applied the ABC test and decided Dynamex wrongfully classified its workers as independent contractors.

According to the ABC test, in order for a hiring entity to legally classify a worker as an independent contractor, it must prove the worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity, performs work outside the scope of the entity’s business and is regularly engaged in work of some independently established trade or other similar business.

Clearly, Lyft is trying to do what it can to make its drivers happy and perhaps minimize the potential of future labor-related lawsuits.

Already, Lyft has put in $30 million toward a campaign initiative to ensure it can continue to classify its drivers and independent contractors. Uber, similarly, has also put in $30 million toward that same initiative.

Robinhood may be best known its free stock trading, but today it’s rolling out a new version of the newsfeed, adding content from Reuters, Barron’s and market coverage from The Wall Street Journal, with no paywall or additional charge.

In addition, Robinhood is introducing video into the newsfeed, with ad-free videos from CNN Business, Cheddar and (again) Reuters.

The startup, which recently raised $323 million at a $7.6 billion valuation, has been showing more interest in content lately with the acquisition of the financial podcast and newsletter MarketSnacks — and as part of the redesign, the newsletter (now called Snacks) can be read directly in the app.

“A lot of this is not even about making investment decisions,” Robinhood’s Vice President of Product Josh Elman told me. “[Some users] check Robinhood very, very often just to consume the news and understand the companies that they’re watching, the ones that they are invested in and continuing to hold.”

He added that just buying and selling stocks is “sort of a utility,” so Robinhood wants to help its users “to feel informed, to be empowered to make their own decisions.”

Before redesigning the newsfeed, Elman said the team did a seven-day study, where they asked subjects to create a diary of “all of their experiences reading and understanding market news.”

Among other things, Elman’s team learned that people “really want to read news from multiple, trusted sources,” which is why Robinhood is partnering with these publications. In addition, they saw that people like watching videos: “Even if it’s in the background, ultimately, people really told us they feel more confident and control in their decisions.”

Along with bringing in new content (which, again, is taken out from behind paywalls and is ad-free), Elman said the Robinhood newsfeed also features “all-new algorithms and a whole new display layer.” Robinhood users can see the new interface for themselves, but I was curious about those algorithms.

“We start with the companies you either own and hold in your portfolio or are watching, what types of sources do you frequently like to watch … and we make sure that we’re bringing you that news as much as possible,” Elman said. “And we have a lot of room to grow from here.”

Some consolidation is afoot in the world of advertising. Taboola and Outbrain, rivals that both operate advertising-based content recommendation engines for publishers — which typically appear in the form of boxes at the bottom of articles online that feature a mix of stories from the publications themselves, plus ads and sponsored content from other sites — are forming a single company.

The aim: to bulk up to a customer list that will now number 20,000 online properties to compete better against the likes of Facebook and Google, online advertising giants that present the biggest competitive threat to both adtech startups and the publishers who are Taboola and Outbrain’s customers.

The two companies, both founded out of Israel but headquartered in New York, describe the deal as a merger, but the combined entity will be called Taboola, with Taboola’s founder Adam Singolda securing the CEO slot. Further, Taboola is paying Outbrain investors $250 million in cash plus a 30% share of the combined companies. The merger is creating a company that will be valued at $2 billion, making the transaction value of this deal $850 million.

Singolda said in an interview that each of them is already profitable and each was already clearing $1 billion in revenues annually. Taboola had individually passed a $1 billion valuation years ago. (Taboola had raised $160 million from investors that include Comcast, Fidelity, and Pitango; Outbrain had raised $194 million with investors including Index, HarbourVest and Lightspeed.)

The deal is literally years in the making. Reports of talks between the two go back as far as 2015, but Singolda said they have actually been talking for the better part of a decade. (Outbrain was founded in 2006, Taboola was founded in 2007.)

The reason it’s taken so long was down to ironing out the details and getting longtime rivals to trust each other.

“It took time to build trust and to get to know each other,” Singolda said. “We needed more time to get to where we are now.”

The reason it finally happened was the existence of a collective threat. “Definitely the pressure of Google and Facebook, and the opportunity to give then a proper fight by increasing our reach was important to us.”

Between Taboola and Outbrain, the companies now have ties to a list of the biggest online media properties around today — with the combined group now working with CNBC, NBC News, USA TODAY, BILD, Sankei, Huffington Post, Microsoft, Business Insider, The Independent, El Mundo, Le Figaro, CNN, BBC, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Spiegel Online, El País and Sky News.

Taboola and Outbrain have positioned themselves as something of the last chance saloon for media companies that have continued to base all or at least some part of their business models on advertising.

In that context, the combined audience scale that Taboola and Outbrain will now have gives them the kind of leverage they believe could help these publishers continue making ad revenues on their own sites, and off the networks of companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Today, these three collectively account for some 70% of all online advertising revenues, and importantly, a large part of the traffic that leads to that revenue is coming on the networks of the companies themselves, through features like search or YouTube (on Google) and Facebook’s news feed. (And that’s a list that Facebook is going to try to extend later this month when it launches its news tab to create an even more dedicated space to news on Facebook itself.)

Taboola and Outbrain’s basic advertising building block, on the other hand, are the widgets that it runs at the bottom of articles on publishers’ own sites, putting the focus back on building and monetizing their traffic there.

Although there is a lot that is similar between the two, there are differences that will potentially create a company that will continue expanding into other areas. For example, Outbrain acquired a company in 2017 called Zemanta that has given it a foothold in programmatic advertising, while Taboola has made moves to expand into video inventory to better compete with the force of YouTube in video advertising.

“We will have lot of work ahead merging the products and we have big competition ahead of us,” Singolda said. “But we have no choice. These are big companies and we have to give them a fight.”

Looking ahead, Singolda said that after the task of integration is underway — which will include not just bringing together technology, but thousands of employees — it will think about what steps to take next. That could include considering a public listing, or raising more money as a private company. Because it’s currently profitable with cash in the bank, Taboola will have some time before it needs to make any decisions.

In addition to Singolda taking the CEO role, there are some other executive shifts. Eldad Maniv, President & COO of Taboola and David Kostman, co-CEO of Outbrain, are not being given any executive titles at the new company yet,  but will help with the transition. Yaron Galai — who had been the CEO of Outbrain — “will remain committed to the success of the combined company, and actively assist with the transition for the 12 months following the closing.”

Fyle, a Bangalore-headquartered startup that operates an expense management platform, has extended its previous financing round to add $4.5 million of new investment as it looks to court more clients in overseas markets.

The additional $4.5 million tranche of investment was led by U.S.-based hedge fund Steadview Capital, the startup said. Tiger Global, Freshworks, and Pravega Ventures also participated in the round. The new tranche of investment, dubbed Series A1, means that the three-and-a-half-year old startup has raised $8.7 million as part of its Series A financing round, and $10.5 million to date.

The SaaS startup offers an expense management platform that makes it easier for employees of a firm to report their business expenses. The eponymous service supports a range of popular email providers including G Suite and Office 365, and uses a proprietary technology to scan and fetch details from emails, Yash Madhusudhan, co-founder and CEO of Fyle, demonstrated to TechCrunch last week.

A user, for instance, could open a flight ticket email and click on Fyle’s Chrome extension to fetch all details and report the expense in a single-click in real-time. As part of today’s announcement, Madhusudhan unveiled an integration with WhatsApp . Users will now be able to take pictures of their tickets and other things and forward it to Fyle, which will quickly scan and report expense filings for them.

These integrations come in handy to users. “80%-90% of a user’s spending patterns land on their email and messaging clients. And traditionally it has been a pain point for them to get done with their expense filings. So we built a platform that looks at the challenges faced by them. At the same time, our platform understands frauds and works with a company’s compliances and policies to ensure that the filings are legitimate,” he said.

“Every company today could make use of an intelligent expense platform like Fyle. Major giants already subscribe to ERP services that offer similar capabilities as part of their offerings. But as a company or startup grows beyond 50 to 100 people, it becomes tedious to manage expense filings,” he added.

Fyle maintains a web application and a mobile app, and users are free to use them. But the idea behind all these integrations with popular services is to make it easier than ever for them to report filings. The startup retains its algorithms each month to improve their scanning abilities. “The idea is to extend expense filing to a platform that people already use,” he said.

Until late last year, Fyle was serving customers in India. Earlier this year, it began chasing customers outside the nation. “Our philosophy was if we are able to sell in India remotely and get people to use the product without any training, we can replicate this in any part of the world.

And that bet has worked. It has amassed more than 300 clients, more than 250 of which are from outside of India. Today, the startup says it has customers in 17 nations including the U.S., and the UK.

To accelerate its momentum, the startup is today also launching an enterprise version of Fyle that will serve the needs of major companies. The enterprise version supports a range of additional features such as IP restriction and single sign-in option and other security features.

In the last five months, its revenue has risen by five times, said Madhusudhan, without disclosing the exact figures.

Fyle will use the new capital to develop more product solutions and integrations and expand its footprint in international markets, Madhusudhan said. The startup, which just recently set up its sales and marketing team would also expand the headcount, he said.
Moving forward, Madhusudhan said the startup would explore tie-ups with ERP providers and other ways to extend the reach of Fyle.

In a statement, Ravi Mehta, MD at Steadview Capital, said, “intelligent and automated systems will empower businesses to be more efficient in the coming decade. We are excited to partner with Fyle to transform one of the core business processes of expense management through intelligence and automation.”

What do you do when your current business model is so staggeringly loss-making you’re having to warn investors it may never turn a profit, at the same time as it’s under increasing legal and regulatory attack?

One answer might be to pivot. Uber isn’t doing that, exactly. Not yet anyway. But it has just officially announced the launch of a new app for matching shift workers with shifts, called Uber Works, working in partnership with staffing agencies.

The announcement confirms a report by the Financial Times a year ago, which reported Uber was working on an on-demand staffing business. The company declined to comment at the time.

The tech giant is best know for its ride-hailing platform but has been diversifying its business for some time — getting into food delivery (Uber Eats) and buying into the micromobility trend (with Jump e-bikes and scooters).

Becoming a matchmaker for shift work is the next step on Uber’s quest for sustainability — both of its core business and, well, its reputation for exploiting labor.

In a blog post about the Uber Works launch, which is starting in Chicago but slated to be expanding to more areas “soon”, the company writes that it’s “committed to deliver services that support skill up-leveling and promote work re-entry”, saying it will be partnering with “various organizations that support workers in their employment journey”.

A month ago Uber’s home turf state of California signed into law a gig worker protections bill that squarely targeted at ride-hailing giants.

The new law means gig economy workers who are managed algorithmically via platforms will very likely be entitled to minimum wage, workers’ compensation and other benefits because it requires employers to apply the ABC test in order to classify a worker as an independent contractor — meaning they will need to prove the worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity; performs work outside the scope of the entity’s business; and is regularly engaged in work of some independently established trade or other similar business.

The law is due to take effect January 1, 2020. Uber is not going gentle into that goodnight, and has continued to deny it should apply to its business — saying it will do what’s necessary to keep the contractor status.

It is pushing against the tide, though. At home and abroad. In Europe it’s already been forced to offer a number of concessions (such as free insurance and caps on working hours) after a series of legal and regulatory challenges, as well as close political scrutiny of how its business operates — including the pay and conditions it provides workers.

The regulator of Uber’s most important regional city — London — continues to withhold a full licence renewal. Transport for London denied its application to renew its licence in 2017, citing safety concerns and questions over its corporate governance and culture.

Uber’s ride-hailing business remains on a very short leash there, with just a two-month extension granted last month — along with fresh conditions.

Safe to say, the costs of ride-hailing aren’t shrinking.

Uber Works looks like an attempt to find a less bumpy path to profitability — via a matchmaking platform for workers who are employed by staffing agencies, which Uber’s blog post is careful to note “employ, pay and handle worker benefits”. Ergo Uber doesn’t have to.

What it wants to be is a technology provider to staffing agencies, offering a platform that matches agency workers to available shifts — in roles such as prep cook, warehouse worker, commercial cleaner and event staff — while also carrying out time-tracking, tied to a carrot for workers of more “timely” payments.

The platform’s ability to track their work will also clearly be working for agencies, though — with Uber suggesting its “technology-first approach” will lead to a “more efficient marketplace… [b]y providing a reliable pool of vetted and qualified workers”. So that’s code for workers who slack off will be seen by the technology to be slacking — and likely won’t get matched to great shifts if they do.

Here’s how Uber is pitching the play:

Today, millions of Americans use staffing agencies to find work. Yet the status quo is not ideal, for workers or for businesses.

Workers face rigid scheduling and opaque information about where they can pick up shifts and how much they can expect to earn. Businesses struggle to staff up to meet peak demand, and have to grapple with missed shifts and high turnover.

We believe a new, technology-first approach can provide faster and easier means for people to get work, while offering greater insight into the many opportunities for work that are out there—improving the experience for workers and businesses alike.

That’s why over the past year, we’ve studied and built tech solutions that can help positively impact a workers’ shift experience and eliminate bottlenecks to finding work.

There is — it must be said — more than a little irony here. In that lawyers for Uber, the ride-hailing giant, have been repeatedly instructed to argue it’s just a technology platform, not a transportation company. (Two years ago Europe’s CJEU blew that argument out of the water though.)

With Uber Works, Uber is again hoping to cast itself as a technology platform. Though by partnering with staffing agencies it’s hope is there’s less legal risk involved.

Uber says the year-long Uber Works project grew out of its business incubator — tapping into its “marketplace technology and operational know-how to help solve pain points that exist in connecting workers with businesses”, as Uber puts it.

There’s no word on where in the US it might expand Uber Works to next.

The tech giant is certainly entering an already crowded field. There are a large number of shift, temp and blue collar work finder apps targeting a similar fast-paced, high turnover employment need in the the US and Europe — including the likes of Bacon, Catapult, Gig, JobToday, Limber, Rota, Shiftgig, Shiifty, Snag and Syft to name a few.

Google Shopping is getting a redesign with several new features, including options to shop local stores, track prices and even find style inspiration through Google Lens. Already, Google Lens’ smart image recognition technology can help identify objects, translate text, and find similar items. Now, using a photo of an outfit you like — for instance, something you found on Instagram — Google Lens will be able to pull up other “style ideas” from around the web.

These style ideas are focused on showing you how other people are wearing the item in question, not just returning matches of similar items, Google explains.

For example, if you found a skirt on social media, you could take a screenshot then use Lens in Google Photos to see how other people have been photographed wearing that same skirt.

But Lens isn’t limited to photos of new clothes posted online. You can also photograph an item hanging in your own closet, or seen on a store rack, and get suggestions of people wearing similar pieces.

The feature complements Lens’ existing item suggestions for things like home décor and individual items of clothing.

It’s also clearly meant as a challenger to Pinterest, which has been heavily investing in its own image recognition technology. This has allowed it to capture consumers’ interest long before their placing items in their online shopping cart — an existential threat to Google’s business, potentially.

Pinterest users often browse the site for inspiration, whether that’s what to wear or how to wear it, or how to decorate their home, or even where to travel. Later, those interests and desires may translate to clicks and purchases. The challenge for Pinterest is being able to connect the inspirational browsing with the checkout process.

Pinterest’s latest efforts on that front is the launch of its own “shop” tab, designed to showcase products.

Google, meanwhile, is doubling down on Google Shopping.

Its big redesign has now rolled out in the U.S. on both web and mobile, following the merger with Google Express earlier this year, and last month’s final shutdown of the Google Express brand and destination. 

The new version of Google Shopping aims to make itself a one-stop-shop for everything that’s around the web…and not on Amazon.

The updated Google Shopping experience includes a personalized homepage based on your habits and purchases, a price tracker for getting notifications of changes and drops, and the ability to shop from both online and local retailers. (Buying locally means you’ll have the option to go pick it up — great for last-minute gifts.)

Google says you can now shop from over 1,000 stores through Google Shopping and check out using the information saved to your Google account. It also offers a “Google guarantee,” on the items you purchase, which includes customer support and help with things like returns and exchanges.

Google is pitching the new experience as a redesign. And to some extent, it is, thanks to new features like price tracking and universal shopping carts. However, at the root of it, you’ll find it’s still very much the same concept that once was Google Express. That is: it’s an online Google-branded destination where shopping is meant to be as convenient as on Amazon.

But Google Express failed to capture consumers’ attention the first time around because of what Google lacks: a Prime competitor. There is no subscription that promises fast, 2-day (or less) shipping on millions of items, nor the wider perks program that Amazon Prime offers.

That said, it’s smart for Google to capitalize on the shopping search traffic it does have, and make that experience feel more connected and seamless. After all, Amazon doesn’t have everything — especially when it comes to specific fashion brands. That will see users turn to Google to search instead.

Google says the new Google Shopping is live in the U.S. on web and mobile today.

Google Lens is also live in the U.S. only for now.

Here’s a solid shout-out to early-stage startup founders who love the word “free.” You have just two weeks left to apply to be a TC Top Pick and exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt Berlin 2019 for — you guessed it — free.

Attending Disrupt Berlin as a TC Top Pick is a VIP experience and an incredible opportunity to showcase your business to the startup world’s influential movers and shakers. The Top Picks application window closes on 18 October at 12 p.m. (PT). Don’t wait — apply today.

Here’s how it all works. We accept applications from early-stage startups that fall into one of the following tech categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, CRM/Enterprise and Education.

Our discerning TechCrunch editors will review every qualified application searching for high-potential startups. They’ll choose up to five to represent each category. Each TC Top Pick receives a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package that includes, among other perks, one day exhibiting in Startup Alley, three Founder passes, access to programming on all stages, the complete attendee list (via TC Events Mobile App) and CrunchMatch — our business networking platform.

As VIPs, Top Picks receive plenty of attention from investors, global press and potential customers. If that’s not enough exposure for you, listen up. A TechCrunch editor will interview every Top Pick startup — live on the Showcase Stage — and we’ll record that interview and promote it across our social media platforms. Talk about a great sales and marketing tool.

Did you know that every startup that exhibits in Startup Alley has a shot at being chosen as a Wild Card? It’s true — even Top Picks. And the startup selected as a Wild Card gets to compete in the Startup Battlefield for the $50,000 prize. Case in point: Legacy, a startup focused on helping men freeze and store their sperm for future use (yes, you read that correctly) exhibited in Startup Alley at Disrupt Berlin 2018. Legacy earned the Wild Card slot, and then it won the Startup Battlefield competition. Crazy big dreams do come true.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, but you have only two weeks left if you want a chance to exhibit in Startup Alley for free. Don’t wait — apply to be a TC Top Pick before the deadline strikes on 18 October at 12 p.m. (PT). Come and show the world what you’ve got!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.