Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Here’s an important reminder to all the shoe-string startups, frugal founders, budget-minded makers and, well, anyone else who loves to save a buck. You have two weeks left to reap the biggest savings on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019.

We offer passes to suit every budget and, depending on the type of pass you buy, the super early-bird pricing can save you up to $1,800. But that opportunity to save big disappears on June 21 at precisely 11:59 p.m. (PT). Procrastination is not your friend. Be a super early bird, buy your pass today and save yourself some serious dough. Plus, you can lock in this super-low price but spread your payments for the event over time by selecting the payment plan option during checkout.

Now get ready to experience all the opportunity, innovation and inspiration that TechCrunch’s flagship Disrupt event offers. We expect more than 10,000 attendees to join us for three jam-packed days of programming dedicated to early-stage startups.

Let’s start with just some of the incredible speakers. You’ll hear from Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, co-founders of OpenAI. They’ll discuss, among other things, their concern about the effect of artificial general intelligence on employment, cyberwarfare and concentration of power.

Online privacy and data protection are seriously hot topics. And who better to discuss them than Gabriel Weinberg — founder and CEO of the pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo. We can’t wait to hear his thoughts on what privacy really means, the potential revival of a Do Not Track browser standard and how he’s built a profitable company by selling principled products.

If you want to launch your startup to the world, there’s no better way to do it than by participating in Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s epic pitch competition. The grand prize is a very epic $100,000. Think your startup has what it takes to win? Then get moving, because you have less than a week left to apply to Startup Battlefield.

If you’re ready for world-class networking, then head directly to Startup Alley, the exhibit hall where you’ll find hundreds of early-stage startups displaying innovative products, platforms and services that span the tech spectrum.

Pro tip: Use CrunchMatch to make your networking so much easier. It helps you find and connect with the right people — based on your specific business goals.

Startup Alley’s also home base for TechCrunch’s Top Picks, a curated collection of outstanding startups representing these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education.

Top Pick designees receive a free Startup Alley Exhibition package and VIP invitations to special events at Disrupt SF. Hey, why not see whether your startup makes the cut? Apply to be a TC Top Pick.

There’s so much more at Disrupt SF 2019 — workshops, Q&A Sessions, demos, the Hackathon. Why not join us on October 2-4 at the lowest possible price? Buy your super early-bird pass now before that opportunity flies the coop on June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

With Congressional probes and greater scrutiny from Federal regulators on the horizon, Apple has abruptly reversed course on its bans of parental control apps available in its app store.

As reported by The New York Times, Apple quietly updated its App Store guidelines to reverse its decision to ban certain parental control apps.

The battle between Apple and certain app developers dates back to last year when the iPhone maker first put companies on notice that it would cut their access to the app store if they didn’t make changes to their monitoring technologies.

The heart of the issue is the use of mobile device management (MDM) technologies in the parental control apps that Apple has removed from the App Store, Apple said in a statement earlier this year.

These device management tools give control and access over a device’s user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions and browsing history to a third party.

“We started exploring this use of MDM by non-enterprise developers back in early 2017 and updated our guidelines based on that work in mid-2017,” the company said.

Apple acknowledged that the technology has legitimate uses in the context of businesses looking to monitor and manage corporate devices to control proprietary data and hardware, but, the company said, it is “a clear violation of App Store policies — for a private, consumer-focused app business to install MDM control over a customer’s device.”

Last month, developers of these parental monitoring tools banded together to offer a solution. In a joint statement issued by app developers including OurPact, Screentime, Kidslox, Qustodio, Boomerang, Safe Lagoon, and FamilyOrbit, the companies said simply, “Apple should release a public API granting developers access to the same functionalities that Apple’s native “Screen Time” uses.”

By providing access to its screen time app, Apple would obviate the need for the kind of controls that developers had put in place to work around Apple’s restrictions.

Essentially it just reverses the company’s policy without granting access to Screen Time as the consortium of companies have suggested.

“It’s been a hellish roller coaster,” said Dustin Dailey, a senior product manager at OurPact, told The New York Times . OurPact had been the top parental control app in the App Store before it was pulled in February. The company estimated that Apple’s move cost it around $3 million, a spokeswoman told the Times.

 

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1. Here’s everything Apple just announced at the 2019 WWDC Keynote

The keynote was an epic two-and-a-half hours long, but unlike TC’s editorial staff, you don’t have to sit through the whole thing — we’ve got a comprehensive rundown for you right here.

The announcements include a dark mode in iOS 13, an iPad-specific version of iOS and the end of iTunes (which is being split into Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and Apple TV).

2. Apple is now the privacy-as-a-service company

In addition to the announcements mentioned above, Apple also unveiled a unified ID platform, illustrating how the company’s approach to privacy will mesh with its ongoing transformation into a services company.

3. Fitness startup Mirror nears $300M valuation with fresh funding

Mirror, a startup selling $1,495 full-length mirrors that double as interactive home gyms, is closing in on a round of funding expected to reach $36 million.

4. Bird is launching a two-seater electric vehicle to become more than a kick scooter startup

The Bird Cruiser can seat up to two people and, depending on the market, it will either be pedal-assist or just have a peg. This marks Bird’s first move outside of the kick scooter space.

5. Spotify launches its lightweight listening app Stations in the US

The app has been considered an experiment by Spotify — and by some, a Pandora copycat, due to its support for instant music playback at launch.

6. Tinder adds sexual orientation and gender identity to its profiles

The company worked with the LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD on changes to its dating app to make it more inclusive.

7. Is your event strategy paying off? How to calculate your event ROI

The standard KPIs rarely provide a meaningful benchmark to determine if an event is successful, or to tell what worked and what didn’t. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Bell Curve founder Julian Shapiro describes his team as talented growth marketers who have a long tail expertise of various channels and who aren’t afraid to play part-time therapists. As an agency, they’re comfortable grounding founder expectations by explaining “No, virality isn’t a dependable growth strategy,” but “Hey, we can come up with a better strategy together.”

Bell Curve, the agency, also runs Demand Curve, a remote growth marketing training program that teaches students (and marketing professionals) the ins and outs of performance marketing.

For a glimpse of how Bell Curve thinks about growth marketing, check out Julian’s guest posts about how startups can actually get content marketing to work and how founders can hire a great growth marketer.

What makes Bell Curve different:

“We run a program where we train companies to run ads on every channel. So, what makes Bell Curve unique is that we, by necessity, have a deep understanding of many more channels than the average agency. We have an archive of tactics and approaches that we’ve accumulated for how to do them just as well as the big ad channels.

In effect, companies come to us when they need expertise beyond Facebook, Google and Instagram, which we still bring to the table, but when they also need to figure out how to make Quora ads profitable, how to get Reddit working, how to get YouTube videos working, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc. These are channels people don’t specialize in enough and so we also bring that long tail of expertise.”

On common misconceptions about growth:

“A common mistake people make coming into growth is thinking that growth hacks are a meaningful thing. The ultimate growth hack is having the self-discipline to pursue growth fundamentals properly and completely. So, things like properly A/B testing, identifying your most enticing value propositions and articulating them clearly and concisely, bringing in deep channel expertise for Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, and a couple of other channels. These are the tenants of making digital growth work. Not one-off hacks.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.

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Interview with Bell Curve Founder Julian Shapiro

Yvonne Leow: Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into this game of growth?

Julian Shapiro: I actually started by running growth for friends’ companies because they had a hard time finding experienced growth marketers. After a year and a half of doing this, I realized it’d be a more stable source of income if I formed an agency. It’d also allow me to pattern match so I could exchange learnings among clients and have a better net performance.

It all came together very quickly. Once Bell Curve hit about 10 clients, we had enough strategic and customer acquisition overlap that we were able to share tactics, double our volume of A/B testing, and get better results. It also gave us the ability to hire out a full-fledged team so we could start specializing, whereas, as a contractor, I was too much of a generalist. I wasn’t able to go deep on certain channels, like Snapchat or Pinterest ads.

Self-driving car startup Aurora might be as buzzy as they come. The company raised more than $530 million just a few months ago in a round led by Sequoia Capital and with “significant investment” from Amazon and T. Rowe Price Associates. We’ve learned Aurora isn’t shy about using that capital with two acquisitions in the books.

But how, when and where will Aurora’s autonomous vehicle technology end up? Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli, who leads product development and program management for all of Aurora’s partnerships, will join us on stage at TC Sessions: Mobility to give us the scoop.

Theodosiou-Pisanelli has had an up close view of the autonomous vehicle industry. Prior to joining Aurora this spring, she was director of business development for Lyft’s self-driving technology business Level 5.

Her background in global government relations at Square as well as a U.S. Trade Representative at the White House, gives Theodosiou-Pisanelli’s insight into how policy and regulations are shaped and might eventually affect the autonomous vehicle industry.

TC Sessions: Mobility will be held July 10 in San Jose. The agenda is packed with some of the biggest names and most exciting startups in the transportation industry, including Mobilieye co-founder and CEO Amnon Shashua, Alisyn Malek with May Mobility, Dmitri Dolgov at Waymo, Karl Iagnemma of Aptiv, Seleta Reynolds of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, and Ford Motor CTO Ken Washington. With Early-Bird ticket sales ending soon, you’ll want to be sure to grab your tickets.

Throughout the day, you can expect to hear from and partake in discussions about the future of transportation, the promise and problems of autonomous vehicles, the potential for bikes and scooters, investing in early-stage startups and more.

Early-Bird tickets are now on sale — save $100 on tickets before prices go up after June 14.

Students, you can grab your tickets for just $45.

Last week 4 security companies changed hands. The shopping spree continued this week with CDN company Imperva, announcing it was buying bot mitigation startup Distil Networks. The companies did not share the acquisition price.

Imperva CTO Kunal Anand says his company had a narrow bot capability, but was looking to bring a more complete solution to the platform and Distil fit the bill nicely.

“When we looked at all of these different variables, and when we looked at the capabilities and the presence that they have in the market, the leadership with analysts, it felt like a no-brainer for us. And once we got to know the team, Rami, and all the folks at Distil, we thought it would be a great pairing to combine these companies,” he explained.

Distil Networks CEO and co-founder Rami Essaid says the paperwork to seal the deal was signed just yesterday and is expected to close in a month. He says he was finding it hard to hold his own as a point solution in a market that increasingly valued a platform of services from a single vendor. Rather than try to build that platform himself, he felt the better move was to become part of an existing platform and Imperva offered him that.

“We were finding it harder and harder to compete as a point solution, outside of being a platform, so we started looking for a platform partner, that we could be a part of to continue our journey, and to continue to do what we do best without having to build an entire platform ourselves,” Essaid told TechCrunch.

The plan is to bring most of Distil’s employees on-board, while the long-term plan is to incorporate the Distil toolset into Imperva’s platform, Essaid says that all of his current customers will have the opportunity to become Imperva customers.

Distil was founded in 2011 and has raised almost $60 million. Imperva was sold last year to private equity firm, Thoma Bravo for $2.1 billion.

Zuora has been known throughout its 12-year history as a company that helps manage subscription-based businesses. Today, at its Subscribed San Francisco customer conference, it announced that it’s adding a new twist to the platform with a new service called Zuora Central.

The latest offering gives developers a workflow tool to build connections between systems that extend the given service using both Zuora’s service set and any external services that make sense. Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO at Zuora, sees this as a way for his customers to offer a set of integrated services that take advantage of the fact that these individual things are connected to the internet, whether that’s a car, an appliance, a garage door opener or a multi-million dollar medical device.

And this isn’t even necessarily about taking advantage of your smartphone, although it could include that. It’s about extending the device or service to automate a set of related tasks beyond the subscription service itself. “So you create a workflow diagram in Zuora Central, that’s going to convey all of the logic of this,” he said.

As an example, Tzuo says imagine you are renting a car. You have reserved a Ford Focus, but when you get to the lot, you decide you want the Mustang convertible. You don’t have to pull out your phone. You simply walk up to the car and touch the handle. It understands who you are and begins to make a series of connections.There may be a call to unlock the car, a call to the music system to play your driving playlist on Spotify, a call to your car preferences that can set the seats and mirrors and so forth. All of this is possible because the car itself is connected to the internet.

Under the hood, the workflow tool takes advantage of a number of different technologies to make all of this happen including a custom object model, an events and notifications system and a data query engine. All of these tools combine to let developers build these complex workflows and connect to a number of tasks, greatly enhancing the capabilities of the base Zuora platform.

As Tzuo sees it, it’s not unlike what happened when he was Chief Marketing Officer at Salesforce before starting Zuroa when they launched Force.com and the AppExchange as a way to allow developers to extend the Salesforce product beyond its base capabilities.

Tzuo also sees this platform play as a logical move for any company that aspires to be a billion dollar revenue company. The company has a ways to go in that regard. In its most recent report at the end of May, it reported $64.1 million in revenue for the quarter. Whether this new capability will do for Zuora what extending the platform did for Salesforce remains to be seen, but this is certainly a big step for the company.

Space is hard on humans – it’s just not what we’re used to, because it’s very unlike this Earth most of us generally occupy for most of our lives. That’s why researchers do plenty of experimentation to figure out what it’s like for people to live and work in space, like a new experiment underway as of May 24 in which a crew of four will be isolated in a spacecraft for 45 days living and working together – but without ever leaving the confines of our planet.

In fact, the crew, which consists of Barret Schlegelmilch, Christian Clark, Ana Mosquera, and Julie Mason, won’t even leave the confines of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. But that’s the point – confined living and working space, for a simulated mission to Phoibos, one of Mars’ two moons. The experiment is what NASA calls a “Human Exploration Research Analog,” which is a contrived acronym that nets you HERA, the greek goddess of family, and basically means a simulated crewed spacecraft mission.

To be clear, the ‘crew’ participating in this experiment aren’t actually astronauts, they’re volunteers who “micic or emulate the type of people that [NASA] select for astronauts,” according to Human Research Program’s Flight Analogs Project Manager Lisa Spence in a statement. And these astronaut analogues will be monitored during the simulated spacecraft mission, with observers specifically looking to check out the impact, both physiological and psychological, or extended confined missions.

This mission is part of a campaign of four that will give researchers a decent cross-sample with the same variables, and this campaign is specifically investigating what happens when a crew has a bit less privacy and space in which to work and live than in other similar experimental mission sets.

All of this is crucial work that needs doing before we go back to the Moon with a crewed mission, which NASA aims to do by 2024. The human component is just as important as the technical aspects, which are also making progress.

Spotify Stations, the streaming service’s lightweight listening app offering easy access to curated playlists, has arrived in the U.S. The app has been considered an experiment by Spotify — and by some others, a Pandora copycat, due to its support for instant music playback at launch.

The Stations app is designed for those who want a more radio-like experience, rather than having to seek out music or customize their own playlists — both of which take time and effort. It could also appeal to those who want a simpler user interface, as Spotify’s flagship app’s look-and-feel isn’t something that everyone likes.

Instead, Stations keeps things minimalist with a scrollable list of playlists and easy tools to customize your own.

In Stations, free users will hear ads, be able to thumbs up and down songs, but can’t skip tracks. Spotify Premium user will get unlimited skips and ad-free listening.

The app features a range of top playlists by genre, decade, activity and more, but over time becomes more personalized to the end user. Users can also personalize their own stations by selecting favorite artists, similar to the customization experience offered today by YouTube Music. A Favorites playlist, based on users’ own interests, is also available.

The Stations app first arrived on the market, initially for Android users in Australia, back in 2018. It just launched on iOS a month ago, but again only in Australia.

At the time, Spotify wouldn’t comment on its plans to bring the app to other markets — but the expansion seemed like a positive sign that Spotify was getting good feedback from Stations’ users.

Stations is available today in the U.S. on iOS. 

Tinder is adding information about sexual orientation and gender identity to its profiles.

The company worked with the LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD on changes to its dating app to make it more inclusive.

Users who want to edit or add more information about their sexual orientation can now simply edit their profile. When a Tinder user taps on the “orientation” selection they can choose up to three terms that describe their sexual orientation. Those descriptions can either be private or public, but will likely be used to inform matches on the app.

Tinder has also updated the onboarding experience for new users so that they can include their sexual orientation as soon as they sign up for the dating app.

Tinder is also giving users more control over how they order matches. In the “Discovery Preferences” field Tinderers can choose to see people of the same orientation first.

The company said this is a first step in its efforts to be more inclusive. The company will continue to work with GLAAD to refine its products and is making the new features available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland, India, Australia and New Zealand throughout June.