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Calling all budget-conscious, bargain-loving members of the early-stage startup community. Here’s a real quick way for you to save up to $1,300 on your pass to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 (October 2-4). Buy your passes before early bird pricing flies the coop. You have until 11:59 p.m. (PST) on August 30. That just four days left to reap serious savings.

TechCrunch’s flagship event is an epic, three-day startup adventure spanning the tech spectrum. Join more than 10,000 attendees, 1,200 exhibiting early-stage startups and sponsors, take in the world-famous Startup Battlefield pitch competition, the TC Hackathon, the workshops and the Q&A sessions — and so much more.

Disrupt events are famous for incredible speakers across four unique stages and Disrupt SF will not disappoint. Let’s take a look at just some of the presentations you’ll enjoy.

• Getting to IPO: PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada led the company to a successful IPO earlier this year. She’ll join Box CEO, Aaron Levie to talk about how these two companies charted their path to an IPO, the pros and cons of doing so, and life after ringing the bell on Wall Street.
• How to Raise My First Dollars: Venture funding may have boomed over the last decade, but the decisions around your initial funding are as tricky as ever. Hear how to take advantage of the current landscape from top Silicon Valley early-stage thinkers including pre-seed investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures, early-stage investor Annie Kadavy of Redpoint Ventures, and Russ Heddleston, CEO of Docsend.
• When Spies Meet Startups: Since leaving the world of intelligence, former NSA director Adm. Mike Rogers and ex-Israeli cyber-intelligence chief Nadav Zafrir talk shop about what startups need learn about security.
• The Business and Ethics of Real Tech Diversity: There’s both a moral and a business imperative to building and fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce. Hear from Project Include’s Ellen Pao and Tracy Chou about what it takes to get there, and from Harry Glaser, General Manager and CMO of Sisense, on how focusing on diversity has positively impacted his bottom line.

That’s merely a taste of greatness, and we’ll be adding even more content in the coming weeks. You can check out the full agenda here.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 runs from October 2-4. Early bird pricing ends in just four days — 11:59 p.m. on August 30. Don’t miss out — buy your pass and save up to $1,300.

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

Your iPhone is capable of some impressive feats of computational photography, and a new app created by developer Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan shows one way all that power can be put to creative use. Emojivision lets you see the world as if it were made up entirely of emojis.

The free app (which induces an in-app purchase for $2.79 that unlocks more emoji packs) works by breaking down your iPhone’s camera sensor input to its color palette fundamentals, finding its nearest neighbor from a subset of emojis (organized thematically within the app) and then rebuilding the image with a filter that overlays the image, and that can run at 60fps so you’d be hard-pressed to spot any lag between it and a real-time feed.

You can use the app to take selfies, interpret photos from your phone’s photo gallery, or just mess around with resolution to see how finely detailed, or how abstractly and yet obviously emoji-based you can get. This isn’t the app to go to if you’re looking for a hyper-realistic or clear visual interpretation of your face, but it is a fun thing to show your friends – and an impressive bit of software engineering, too.

O’Flaherty-Chan has create some noteworthy mobile software projects in the past – including when he managed to hack a fully playable version of Pokémon Yellow onto an Apple Watch. He’s currently working on building a gigantic real-time strategy game set within a procedurally-generated universe – like a ‘No Man’s Sky’ but with a focus on the RTS elements that should make for a very compelling and evolving approach to gathering resources and expanding your empire.

Microsoft just sent out invites for its next big event. Set for October 2 in New York, the unveiling comes exactly a year after the company’s last major Surface hardware launch. The timing is certainly right for one last major product push ahead of the holidays, as well.

Last year’s big event featured the launch of the Surface Pro 6 hybrid, Surface Studio 2, some software announcements and the launch of the Surface Headphone line. There are plenty of entries in Microsoft’s line that are due for a refresh, including Surface laptop and miniature Surface Go tablet.

The company also likes to launch at least one new product line at these things. As the Verge notes, the company’s long-rumored dual-screen tablet certainly seems overripe at this point, which at least two years of product research under its belt.

The above save the day invite, which was sent out to reporters today, subtly alludes to the inclusion of several convertible form factors, while paying homage to the Windows 10 logo.

TechCrunch will partner with General Catalyst for Include Office Hours on September 4th from 1:30pm – 3:30pm. Partners Niko Bonatsos and Kyle Doherty will meet with underrepresented and underserved entrepreneurs to provide key feedback and advice. Founders, apply here!

Founded in 2014, TechCrunch launched the Include Program in an effort to leverage the extensive TechCrunch network to facilitate opportunities for underserved groups and founders. The Include Office Hours Program is one such initiative.

TechCrunch collaborates with investors to host private 20-minute sessions with startups, where founders can ask for guidance on critical business issues. During September’s Include Office Hours, General Catalyst will be meeting with 12 lucky companies. To be considered for a session with these investors, fill out this application.

Unlike previous Office Hours, TechCrunch is looking for startups in the following verticals: Enterprise, B2B, Healthcare, Security, Infrastructure, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, SaaS, Fintech, Digital Commerce, Travel, Real Estate, Marketplaces, Messaging, E-commerce, Gaming and Crypto.

Underserved and underrepresented founders include but are not limited to female founders, black, Latino/a, Asian, LGBTQ, veteran, formerly incarcerated and people with disabilities.

Let’s meet our investors:

Niko Bonatsos

Niko Bonatsos is a managing director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm with approximately $5 billion in total capital raised. Working from the firm’s San Francisco Bay Area offices, Niko focuses his investment strategy on finding first-time technology founders with strong product instincts, a robust appetite for learning and a desire to create innovations with the potential to benefit millions of consumers or business end users.

In his eight years with GC, Niko has been instrumental in the firm’s investments in Snap (NYSE: SNAP), 6d.ai, Atrium, Audius, Cover, Hive, HubHaus, ClassDojo, Paribus (acquired by CapitalOne), and Wag!, among others.

Prior to joining General Catalyst, Niko attended Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar, earning an MS in Management Science and Engineering. He has studied in several countries, earning additional degrees in Manufacturing Engineering & Management and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and worked as a part of the R&D team for Yokogawa Electric Corporation in Japan. Find Niko on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Kyle Doherty

Kyle Doherty is a managing director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm with offices in Boston, New York, Palo Alto and San Francisco and with approximately $5 billion in total capital raised. At GC, Kyle focuses on investing in large, greenfield opportunities in consumer internet and software companies. Notable investments he’s made at GC include Canva Common Networks, and GitLab.

Prior to joining General Catalyst, Kyle worked with Coatue Management, where he helped conceive and launch the firm’s private investment practice and grew it into a leading private technology investment platform. Before Coatue, Kyle spent time as an investor at Morgenthaler and as an equity analyst.

Kyle studied economics and finance at MIT and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Though now living in the Bay Area, he’s stayed true to his hometown roots and remains a big fan of the Celtics and the Patriots. On non-game weekends, he can be found hiking the great outdoors with his family and border collie, Brady.

If you are an investor, partner or managing director at a fund interested in hosting Include Office Hours, email neesha@techcrunch.com.

What comes first: Sales or Customer Success? Many growing startups pressure themselves to start selling as soon as there’s a viable product to sell. “Set up Customer Success functions” goes on the to-do list. After all, we don’t have to worry for another year, right?

Using the proprietary Scale Studio dataset of hundreds of SaaS startups, we’ll look at the metrics that venture investors use to link your company’s valuation to success in Customer Success — then dive into the tactics for adapting your CS program to your company’s high-touch or low-touch sales model

A year passes, and the company’s first renewals come due. Everyone from the CEO on down scrambles to do whatever it takes to make those charter customers happy and win contract extensions. After all, those customers aren’t just any customers — they’re the company’s first references, critical to landing new business and raising funds from investors. Every effort goes into making them happy.

The problem is, of course, that bringing in the CEO and CTO and VP of Sales on every renewal isn’t exactly a scalable process. Nor the basis for a long-term Customer Success strategy. 

Customer Success — a formal, process-driven, value-creating operational activity — needs to be structured to scale. And it needs to be top-of-mind from day one. Here is a look at the data and strategic rationale for launching CS early in a startup’s growth to avoid inefficiency and mistakes down the line. 

The case for customer success: Valuation

To venture investors, a well-run CS operation at an early-in-revenue startup communicates that your company has a sophisticated go-to-market strategy with a customer-centric foundation. This can translate into a valuation boost along two paths: accelerated revenue growth and increased predictability. And growth is a key driver for valuation with venture investors. 

Google is introducing combo navigation directions that pair ridesharing and biking options with transit guidance. Starting today, when you search from directions using Google Maps and select the ‘transit’ tap, you’ll see ridesharing options included when the nearest station is a bit further than most people might expect to go on foot. Similarly, you’ll also see routes with bike suggestions for certain legs, all listed alongside routes that stick to just transit alone for a full range of options.

The new hybrid navigation options will include useful info life the cost of rideshare segments, as well as wait times and traffic conditions. You’ll be able to specify your preferred rideshare provider from this available through Google Maps in your area, and also pick which rideshare method you prefer (ie., pool or economy).

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Bikers will get route directions specific to the best paths and roads for bikes to takes, and in both cases, all of the available info will be fed into providing an overall ETA, so you can make an informed decision about which route and method of transportation to take depending on when you need to be where you’re going.

Google says that the combined transit/ridesharing navigation will start rolling out today on both Android and iOS, and that iOS users will start seeing the biking options today, with Android to follow in the coming weeks.

While Slack is trying to kill email, a new email startup backed by Kleiner Perkins is trying to make corporate email more like Slack.

Consider is an email service for startups that balances some premium individual features with collaboration tools that it hopes will help them bring startups onboard.

The founders of Consider both met at Intercom as the 1st and 10th employees there. While at Intercom, CEO Ben McRedmond met Kleiner Perkins’ Mamood Hamid who was an early investor there. Hamid also wrote the first check for Consider before the founders even had a product to demo. That 2017 check combined with a more recent investment from Bedrock brings the total funding for the startup to $5 million.

As the product emerges from stealth, it’s also signaling a shift in its customer focus from individuals wanting an email experience that’s “calm and focused” to startup teams that are looking to keep more of their team’s collaboration happening inside email.

The central part of this strategy is the addition of a Slack-like Groups feature which allows people to join shared inboxes inside their company that people can forward messages to or cc on emails. The founders started the company with the idea that the inbox was essentially a list of to-dos, with this idea also extending to group-work, allowing engineers to amass bug reports and create a shared repository of emails with relevance to the whole group.

The startup says they aren’t actually trying to kill Slack or other synchronous chat tools but they want people to use email in a more collaborative way and part of that means categorizing the emails you receive and putting them in front of the right eyeballs. The fact is, the bulk of this functionality — though not all — is possible inside of stock Gmail with the right filters, but it’s all pretty messy and people will generally pay for an interface that is built to be effective.

The premium email service space has been gathering attention, most of that attention has been directed towards $30/month Superhuman, which was recently valued at $260 million.

Consider is charging $10 per user per month. They’re not discouraging individual users curious for a new inbox experience either, though without Groups there is less to differentiate the app. On an individual basis the app brings functionality focused on sorting emails and sending you batches of the ones it has deemed non-critical at certain times of the day so you aren’t being inundated with notifications.

The app is out of beta and live for sign-ups of Gmail users on Web, Mac, iOS and Android.

WeWork, now known as The We Company, announced this morning the acquisition of a rival co-working business, Spacious. The three-year-old, New York-based startup turns restaurants that sit empty during the day into co-working spaces, and is one of several niche co-working startups — like Convene, Knotel, Industrious, The Yard, The Wing, and Alley, for example.

Spacious was co-founded in 2016 by CEO Preston Pesek, whose background is in commercial real estate. The company’s goal was to take advantage of under-utilized urban spaces, including abandoned retail stores and empty restaurants, to serve the co-working crowd. The company has since converted dozens of restaurants in New York and San Francisco into weekday workspaces.

Customers can access the workspaces with anything from a $20 day pass all the way up to a $129 per month annual membership.

The restaurants benefit from the arrangement by gaining a new form a revenue in what’s an otherwise slim margin business, while also have the chance to attract new customers from the Spacious members who frequent their business. Customers, who may have otherwise worked from coffee shops, liked the arrangement because it was more affordable than WeWork. Some may have also liked that there was a hard stop to their workday, as the restaurant would have to open for business.

The Spacious team and its lineup of workspaces will now come to WeWork, the company says.

“Spacious’s team and real estate and operational expertise will help enable WeWork to continue to give our members access to the workspace they want, when they need it,” said WeWork chief product officer Chris Hill. “We’re thrilled to welcome Spacious to WeWork,” in a statement.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Spacious had raised just over $9 million, according to data from Crunchbase, from investors including Baseline Ventures, Redpoint, Lerer Hippeau, August Capital, MetaProp NYC, and BoxGroup.

The full announcement from Spacious CEO Preston Pesek is below.

It’s our great pleasure to announce to the Spacious community the exciting news that we are joining the WeWork family.

Since our inception, Spacious has explored new ways of activating and re-programming the physical built environment, in direct response to the technological changes that are revolutionizing how we interact with spaces, buildings, and cities.

In WeWork, we have found much natural alignment across our visions for the integration of work, technology, and physical space. We’re thrilled for the opportunity to continue to serve our members at Spacious today as part of the greater WeWork community.

Spacious’s service delivers a distributed network of walk-in, on-demand workspaces, wrapped in an experience of stylish hospitality. By joining WeWork, we’re taking the next step in providing easy access to on-demand workspaces across the world.

I would like to extend a big thanks to everyone who has joined us on this journey of building Spacious. From our team of amazing employees, to our loyal and enthusiastic customers, to our pioneering space and real estate partners, and to our intrepid investors, thank you. I hope you will join me in celebrating this exciting new opportunity with WeWork.

Sincerely yours,

Preston Pesek

CEO of Spacious

The Dutch data protection agency has asked Microsoft’s lead privacy regulator in Europe to investigate ongoing concerns it has attached to how Windows 10 gathers user data.

Back in 2017 the privacy watchdog found Microsoft’s platform to be in breach of local privacy laws on account of how it collects telemetry metadata.

After some back and forth with the regulator, Microsoft made changes to how the software operates in April last year — and it was in the course of testing those changes that the Dutch agency found fresh reasons for concern, discovering what it calls in a press release “new, potentially unlawful, instances of personal data processing”. 

Since the agency’s investigation of Windows 10 started a new privacy framework is being enforced in Europe — the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which means Microsoft’s lead EU privacy regulator is the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), where its regional HQ is based. This is why the Dutch agency has referred its latest concerns to Ireland.

It will now be up to the Irish DPC to investigate Windows 10, adding to its already hefty stack of open files on multiple tech giants’ cross-border data processing activities since the GDPR came into force last May.

The regulation steps up the penalties that can be imposed for violations (to up to 4% of a company’s annual global turnover).

A spokeswoman for the Irish DPC confirmed to TechCrunch that it received the Dutch agency’s concerns last month. “Since then the DPC has been liaising with the Dutch DPA to further this matter,” she added. “The DPC has had preliminary engagement with Microsoft and, with the assistance of the Dutch authority, we will shortly be engaging further with Microsoft to seek substantive responses on the concerns raised.”

A Microsoft spokesperson also told us:

The Dutch data protection authority has in the past brought data protection concerns to our attention, which related to the consumer versions of Windows 10, Windows 10 Home and Pro. We will work with the Irish Data Protection Commission to learn about any further questions or concerns it may have, and to address any further questions and concerns as quickly as possible.

Microsoft is committed to protecting our customers’ privacy and putting them in control of their information. Over recent years, in close coordination with the Dutch data protection authority, we have introduced a number of new privacy features to provide clear privacy choices and easy-to-use tools for our individual and small business users of Windows 10. We welcome the opportunity to improve even more the tools and choices we offer to these end users.

The Dutch DPA advises users of Windows 10 to pay close attention to privacy settings when installing and using the software.

“Microsoft is permitted to process personal data if consent has been given in the correct way,” it writes. “We’ve found that Microsoft collect diagnostic and non-diagnostic data. We’d like to know if it is necessary to collect the non-diagnostic data and if users are well informed about this.

“Does Microsoft collect more data than they need to (think about dataminimalization as a base principle of the GDPR). Those questions can only be answered after further examination.”

During the onboarding process for Windows 10, Microsoft makes multiple requests to process user data for various reasons, including ad purposes.

It also deploys the female voice of Cortana, its digital assistant technology, to provide a running commentary on settings screens — which can include some suggestive prompts to agree to its T&Cs. “If you don’t agree, y’know, no Windows!” the human-sounding robot says at one point. It’s not clear whether the Dutch agency’s concerns extend to Microsoft’s use of Cortana to nudge users during the Windows 10 consent flow.

PlaceIQ is announcing a strategic investment from credit reporting company Experian.

CEO Duncan McCall said the investment is part of a growth round that PlaceIQ raised after divesting itself of its advertising business (which is being taken over by Zeta Global). He declined to disclose the size of the round, or of the Experian investment.

“It’s a multi-year, strategic partnership, where we will work together to license data [to Experian], and they also proactively become an investor in the company,” McCall said, adding that this “coincided nicely with us divesting of our media business and raising a modest growth round.”

Experian’s venture arm has backed a number of financial technology startups. Under this partnership, the company will also incorporate PlaceIQ’s LandMark location data product into its broader suite of data and measurement tools.

Asked about the direction of PlaceIQ’s business going forward, McCall explained that the company started with a focus on selling location data, and now, it’s gone back to “being a data-only company again.”

“Of course, we would have preferred to have focused on just one business model all these years, but life’s not that simple,” he said.

In his telling, PlaceIQ had to expand into the ad sales business because the infrastructure didn’t exist at the time to incorporate that data into the ad-buying process. Now that the infrastructure is there, PlaceIQ can focus once more on selling location data, which can then be used for targeting on a broad range of ad-buying platforms.

According to Crunchbase, PlaceIQ previously raised a total of $52 million in funding.