Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Political parties, campaigns, and brands can’t get an accurate and cost-effective understanding of opinion in small geographic areas, like the constituencies of lawmakers. This is a big problem in political campaigning. And all political campaigning now has a huge online element, as we know. We also know political turbulence is one of the defining themes of our age.

But one thing is clear. All the players want faster, cheaper, more accurate and a more granular understanding of consumers and voters. In the age of AI, survey predictions are influenced as much as so many other machine-learning technology products.

Focaldata is a UK-startup that thinks it has some of the answers to these quandaries. Their integrated consumer analytics and survey workflow application claims to give customers a more accurate and granular picture of consumers than traditional polling using machine learning. At the same time, they say their workflow software cuts down on the cost and time market research takes.

The idea is that they employ a new machine learning based technique (MRP) to generate survey ‘results’. This new methodology can use more information (such as old survey data or public statistics) than conventional methods, which lets them get accurate predictions in small geographic areas from the same sample sizes.

Founder Justin Ibbett had done MRP manually on his laptop a few times for some existing market research firms and realized how fiddly it was. “I felt a dedicated software application would reduce the complexity whilst making the results more accessible and useful- our early incarnations just delivered a spreadsheet!” he told me.

Much of Focaldata’s business has been in politics. They have worked with the pro-Remain group Best for Britain and the anti-Racism charity Hope not Hate on combating Far Right sentiment. However, most demand is now from large brand owners, such as ABInBev, a recent client.
They now have over 10 paying clients including big brands like M&C Saatchi.

Competitors include YouGov, Survation, Dalia Research (a Balderton-backed company), and standard market research agencies like Kantar, Ipsos Mori.

But against traditional agencies, Ibbett says their ML-based data processing engine sets them apart, allowing them to go very granular and get more accurate over time.

The market research market is £5bn in the UK alone (PwC report, 2016) and global market research is a $40bn market.

The startup has raised a £1.1m seed round from notable UK angels including Alex Chesterman, founder of Zoopla and Martin Bolland, founder of Alchemy Partners. Previously they had raised a small pre-seed round from 3 other angels, including Xen Lategan (backer of Magic Pony and ex-Google, former CTO of News International)

CTO and co-founder Calvin Dudek was at Google for 5 years as a product manager, and ran Data Science Innovation at the DWP. Chief Data Scientist Takao Noguchi is a cognitive scientist.

A year ago, Apple acquired the digital newsstand app Texture to form the basis of its new subscription-based service, Apple News+, which launched on Monday. As some have expected, the standalone Texture app will soon shut down as a result. According to emails sent to current Texture subscribers pointing to a FAQ on the company’s website, Texture’s last day of service will be May 28, 2019. Existing customers will be offered a one-month free trial to Apple News+ to make the jump.

A closure like this was bound to come. It doesn’t make sense for Apple to continue to operate both Texture and Apple News.

But not everyone is thrilled about this change, of course.

Specifically, Android users and other subscribers without any Apple devices will now no longer have a way to access Texture, they’ve realized. That means they’ll lose access to the service entirely when it closes down in May (unless they buy a Mac or iOS device.)

These customers were early adopters of subscription-based news reading. Many have had their Texture accounts for years. And it’s clear that most were holding out hope that Apple would launch a web or Android version of Apple News, or at least continue to operate Texture until such a thing was ready.

It wouldn’t have been entirely unprecedented for Apple to go this route.

Apple today runs an Apple Music Android app, for example, and offers an Android app for its Beats Pill speakers. It also provides desktop software to non-Mac users with iTunes for Windows, for example. And with the launch of Apple TV+, the company is seemingly embracing non-Apple platforms by rolling out an Apple TV app to Vizio, Samsung and LG smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV, and Roku.

It’s also bit surprising that Texture’s existing customers aren’t being offered a better incentive to switch to Apple News+, as a way to reward their loyalty or to make up for the frustrations around having to switch apps – especially since their favorites and collections will not transition to the Apple News app. Instead, the Texture email says they’ll be offered a “one month free trial” to test out the service. That’s the same deal all new Apple News+ subscribers get.

After the first month, the subscription will auto-renew at $9.99 per month.

Apple News+, however, does deliver more value than Texture, in terms of content selection.

Instead of only offering access to hundreds of magazines for one low subscription price, Apple News+ subscribers can also read articles from a handful of newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Toronto Star, as well as online publications like theSkimm, The Highlight by Vox, New York Magazine’s sites Vulture, The Cut and Grub Street. TechCrunch’s own subscription product, Extra Crunch, is also participating in Apple News+.

It’s also available for the Mac for the first time.

That doesn’t help non-Apple customers, though.

Those losing access to Texture as a result of Apple’s decision to make Apple News+ an Apple device-only service do at least have something of an alternative with Scribd. Its subscription service offers unlimited access to audiobooks, ebooks and magazines for $8.99/month, or can be bundled with The NYT for $12.99/month. However, it doesn’t have the same range of magazines as on Texture, so switchers may lose access to several of their favorite titles.

Alibaba has made an acquisition as it continues to square up to the opportunity in enterprise services in China and beyond, akin to what its US counterpart Amazon has done with AWS. TechCrunch has confirmed that the e-commerce and cloud services giant has acquired Teambition, a Microsoft- and Tencent-backed platform for coworkers to plan and collaborate on projects together, similar to Trello and Asana.

There were rumors of an acquisition circulating yesterday in Chinese media. Alibaba has now confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch but declined to provide any other details.

Teambition had raised about $17 million in funding since 2013, with investors including Tencent, Microsoft, IDG Capital and Gobi Ventures. Gobi also manages investments on behalf of Alibaba, and that might have been one route to how the two became acquainted.

As with others in the project management and collaboration space, Teambition provides users with mobile and desktop apps to interact with the service, and in addition to the main planning interface, there is one designed for CRM called Bingo, as well as a “knowledge base” where businesses can keep extra documentation and other collateral.

The deal is another sign of how Alibaba has been slowly building a business in enterprise powerhouse over the last several years as it races to keep its pole position in the Chinese market, as well as gain a stronger foothold in the wider Asian region and beyond.

In China alone, it has been estimated that enterprise services is a $1 billion opportunity, but with no clear leader at the moment across a range of verticals and segments that fall under that general umbrella, there is a lot to play for, and likely a lot more consolidation to come. (And it’s not the only one: Bytedance — more known for consumer services like TikTok — is rumored to be building a Slack competitor, and Tencent also has its sights on the sector, as does Baidu.)

As with AWS, Alibaba’s enterprise business stems out of the cloud-based infrastructure Alibaba has built for its own e-commerce powerhouse, which it has productised as a service for third parties that it calls Alibaba Cloud, which (like AWS) offers a range of cloud-storage and serving tiers to users.

On top of that, Alibaba has been building and integrating a number of apps and other services that leverage that cloud infrastructure, providing more stickiness for the core service as well as the potential for developing further revenue streams with customers.

These apps and services range from the recently-launched “A100” business transformation initiative, where Alibaba proposes working with large companies to digitise and modernize (and help run) their IT backends; through to specific products, such as Alibaba’s Slack competitor DingTalk.

With Alibaba declining to give us any details beyond a confirmation of the acquisition, and Teambition not returning our requests for comment, our best guess is that this app could be a fit in either of areas. That is to say, one option for Alibaba would be to integrate it and use it as part of a wider “business transformation” and modernization offering, or as a standalone product, as it currently exists.

Teambition today counts a number of Chinese giants, and giants with Chinese outposts, as customers, including Huawei, Xiaomi, TCL, and McDonalds in its customer list. The company currently has nothing on its site indicating an acquisition or any notices regarding future services, so it seems to be business as usual for now.

The opportunity around collaboration and workplace communication has become a very hot area in the last few years, spurred by the general growth of social media in the consumer market and people in business environments wanting to bring in the same kinds of tools to help them get work done. Planning and project management — the area that Teambition and its competitors address — is considered a key pillar in the wider collaboration space alongside cloud services to store and serve files and real-time communication services.

Slack, which is now valued at over $7 billion, has said it’s filed paperwork for a public listing, while Asana is now valued at $1.5 billion, while Trello’s owner Atlassian now has a market cap of nearly $26 billion.

The past couple of years have marked some steep ups and downs for Huawei. Just this morning, the company posted a 25 percent raise in profit to $8.84 billion in 2018. Yesterday, on the other hand, a UK oversight body issued a report noting “serious and systematic defects.”

While it’s true that on-going security concerns and reports of Huawei’s ties to the Chinese government haven’t put a damper on the company’s profits, they have managed to stifle its international growth. But it’s not giving up without a fight. Mobile chief Richard Yu famously raged against U.S. carriers at a keynote a couple of CESes back, and now another top exec is back with some not-so-kind words.

In an interview with the Financial Times posted today, Guo Ping, one of Huawei’s rotating chairman,   took the U.S. government to task. “The US government has a loser’s attitude,” he told the site. “They want to smear Huawei because they can’t compete with us.”

FT says Guo went on to add that “the US has abandoned all table manners.” The executive does rightly point out that, “Countries have made their own decisions based on their own interests, not the interests of the US.” While some have heeded the U.S. government’s calls, other bodies, including the E.U. have taken a more cautious approach to the company, without embracing an outright ban.

While Huawei has been making the bulk of its money on consumer devices, these sorts of bans will become more and more part of Huawei’s bottomline as the world looks to competitors to supply 5G networking equipment.

Nativo has acquired SimpleReach, a move that Nativo CEO Justin Choi said will pair his company’s distribution system for native ads with SimpleReach’s measurement tools.

“If you can’t measure the impact of something, it’s difficult to scale spend in that area,” Choi told me. “When we say measurement we’re actually talking about connecting content to outcomes.”

To be clear, Nativo already offers measurement tools of its own, but apparently they’re limited to content that the brand or marketer is publishing on their own sites. SimpleReach, on the other hand, can measure sponsored content programs published elsewhere on the web, so Choi said it provides a “complementary measurement technology.”

Both Nativo and SimpleReach are long-standing players (and partners) in the native advertising and content marketing industry. Choi said Nativo has succeeded by “focusing on content,” and on the “mid-funnel” of the customer purchase journey.

“Almost all our relationships involve … the actual brands themselves, because we do solve a unique problem for them,” Choi said. “That middle part of: How you get someone to consider something? How do you create intent?”

The companies aren’t disclosing the financial terms of the acquisition. SimpleReach has raised a total of $24 million from investors including MK Capital, Atlas Ventures, Village Ventures, High Peak Venture Partners and Spring Mountain Capital.

Choi said the company will continue to support SimpleReach as a separate product while also working to integrate its data into Nativo. Apparently “all the core team members” (less than 10 people) are joining Nativo, as are an off-site engineering team.

He added that the remaining team members have already been hired elsewhere, so “everyone that wanted a home ended up with a home.”

From Extra Crunch

• I wrote a comprehensive look at the new norms around Form D filings, which are filed with the SEC after a venture round closes. Those who’ve read this newsletter for a while know that I’ve been researching this topic for some months now. This is the sort of story that I love: a technical issue, but one with freakishly large consequences for founders and frankly for society in general. Do have a read if you have no idea what a Form D is or why it is important.
• John Eden has a look at how software and regulations are opening up the shipping and logistics space for startups and greater competition.
• The first part of the Niantic EC-1 drops later today – do take a look at the Extra Crunch stream a few hours from now to catch it all early.

Wide Angle

Stories from outside the 280/101 corridor

As I walked the long halls of Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas and listened to the company’s marketing and data integration story, I thought about the obvious disconnect that happens between brands and their customers. With tons of data, a growing set of tools to bring it together, and a desire to build an optimal experience, you would think we have been set up for thrilling consumer experiences, yet we all know that is not always what happens when the rubber meets the road.

Maybe part of the problem is that data sitting in databases doesn’t always translate into employee action when dealing directly with consumers. In many cases, the experience isn’t smooth, data isn’t passed from one source to another, and when you do eventually reach a person, they aren’t always knowledgeable or even nice.

It’s to the point that when my data does get passed smoothly from bot to human CSA, and I’m not asked for the same information for the second or even third time, I’m pleasantly surprised, even a little shocked.

That’s probably not the story marketing automation vendors like Adobe and Salesforce want to hear, but it is probably far more common than the one about delighted customers. I understand that the goal is to provide APIs to connect systems. It’s to stream data in real time from a variety of channels. It’s about understanding that data better by applying intelligent analytics, and to some extent I’m sure that’s happening and that there are brands who truly do want to delight us.

The disconnect could be happening because brands can control what happens in the digital world much better than the real one. They can know at a precise level when you interact with them and try to right wrongs or inconsistencies as quickly as possible. The problem is when we move to human interactions — people talking to people at the point of sale in a store, or in an office or via any communications channel — all of that data might not be helpful or even available.

The answer to that isn’t to give us more digital tools, or more tech in general, but to work to improve human-to-human communication, and maybe arm those human employees with the very types of information they need to understand the person they are dealing with when they are standing in front of them.

If brands can eventually get these human touch points right, they will build more loyal customers who want to come back, the ultimate goal, but right now the emphasis seems to be more on technology and the digital realm. That may not always achieve the desired results.

This is not necessarily the fault of Adobe, Salesforce or any technology vendor trying to solve this problem, but the human side of the equation needs to be a much stronger point of focus than it currently seems to be. In the end, all the data in the world isn’t going to save a brand from a rude or uninformed employee in the moment of customer contact, and that one bad moment can haunt a brand for a long, long time, regardless how sophisticated the marketing technology it’s using may be.

If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website dedicated to sexy text and audio. The 22-year-old college senior tells TechCrunch that on April 13th she’ll launch Quinn, which she describes as “a much less gross, more fun Pornhub for women”.

TechCrunch checked out Quinn’s private beta site, which is pretty bare bones right now. Caroline tells us she’s already raised under a million dollars for the project. But given her brother’s success spotting the next generation’s behavior patterns and turning them into beloved products, Caroline might find investors are eager to throw cash at Quinn. That’s especially true given she’s taking a contrarian approach. There will be no imagery on Quinn.

Caroline explains that “There’s no visual content on the site– just audio and written stories. And the whole thing is open source, so people can submit content and fantasies, etc. Everything is vetted by us before it goes on the site.” Caroline is building Quinn with a three-woman team of her best friends she met while at college at Stanford including Greta Meyer, though they plan to relocate to LA after graduation.

“His dream girl was named ‘Quinn'”

The idea for Quinn sprung from a deeply personal need. “I came up with it because I had to leave Stanford my junior year because i was struggling with anorexia and sexual dysfunction that came along with that” Caroline tells me. “I started to do a lot of research into sexual dysfunction cures. There are about 30 FDA-approved drugs for sexual dysfunction for men but zero for women and that’s a big bummer.”

She believes there’s still a stigma around women pleasuring themselves, leading to a lack of products offering assistance. Sure, there are plenty of porn sites but few are explicitly designed for women, and fewer stray outside of visual content. Caroline says photos and videos can create body image pressure, but with text and audio, anyone can imagine themselves in a scene. “Most visual media perpetuates the male gaze . . . all mainstream porn tells one story . . . You don’t have to fit one idea of what a woman should look like.”

That concept fits with the startup’s name “Quinn”, which Caroline says one of her best guy friends thought up. “He said this girl he met — his dream girl — was named ‘Quinn.'”

Caroline took to Reddit and Tumblr to find Quinn’s first creators. Reddit stuck to text and links for much of its history, fostering the kinky literature and audio communities. And when Tumblr banned porn in December, it left a legion of adult content makers looking for a new home. “Our audio ranges from guided masturbation to overheard sex, and there’s also married stories. It’s literally everything. Different strokes for different for folks, know what I mean?” Caroline says with a cheeky laugh.

To establish its brand, Quinn is running social media influencer campaigns where “The basic idea is to make people feel like it’s okay to experience pleasure. It’s hard to make something like masturbation cool, so that’s a little bit of a lofty goal. We’re just trying to make it feel okay, and even more okay than it is for men.”

As for the business model, Caroline’s research found younger women were embarrassed to pay for porn. Instead Quinn plans to run ads, though there could be commerce opportunities too. And since the site doesn’t bombard users with nude photos or hardcore videos, it might be able to attract sponsors that most porn sites can’t.

Evan is “very supportive”

Until monetization spins up, Quinn has the sub-$1 million in funding that Caroline won’t reveal the source of, though she confirms it’s not from her brother. “I wouldn’t say that he’s particularly involved other than he’s one of the most important people in my life and I talk to him all the time. He gives me the best advice I can imagine” the younger sibling says. “He doesn’t have any qualms, He’s very supportive.”

Quinn will need all the morale it can get, as Caroline bluntly admits “we have a lot of competitors”. There’s the traditional stuff like Pornhub, user generated content sites like Make Love Not Porn, and spontaneous communities like on Reddit. She calls $5 million-funded audio porn startup Dipsea “an exciting competitor” though she notes that “we sway a little more erotic than they do, but we’re so supportive of their mission.” How friendly.

Quinn’s biggest rival will likely be outdated but institutionalized site Literotica, which SimilarWeb ranks as the 60th most popular adult website, 631st most visited site overall, showing it gets 53 million hits per month. But the fact that Literotica looks like a web 1.0 forum yet has so much traffic signals a massive opportunity for Quinn. With rules prohibiting Quinn from launching native mobile apps, it will have to put all its effort into making its website stand out if it’s going to survive.

But more than competition, Caroline fears that Quinn will have to convince women to give its style of porn a try. “Basically, there’s this idea that for men, masturbation is an innate drive and for women it’s a ‘could do without it, could do with it’. Quinn is going to have to make a market alongside a product and that terrifies me” Caroline says, her voice building with enthusiasm. “But that’s what excites me the most about it, because what I’m banking on is if you’ve never had chocolate before, you don’t know. But once you have it, you start craving it. A lot of women haven’t experienced raw, visceral pleasure before, [but once we help them find it] we’ll have momentum.”

Most importantly, Quinn wants all women to feel they have rightful access to whatever they fancy. “It’s not about deserving to feel great, You don’t have to do Pilates to use this. You don’t have to always eat right. There’s no deserving with our product. Our mission is for women to be more in touch with themselves and feel fucking great. It’s all about pleasure and good vibes.”

Crackle sells to Chicken Soup for the Soul. That’s not an early April Fool’s joke, but rather the news that Sony’s aging streaming service Crackle has now found a new home with Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, or CSS Entertainment – the same company that today runs the streaming service Popcornflix and other streaming channels. (And yes, is also behind the well-known book series.)

The news was first reported by Variety, and further detailed in a press release issued this morning.

CSS Entertainment will now be the majority shareholder in the new joint venture, rebranded as “Crackle Plus.” Sony, meanwhile, will receive 4 million five-year warrants to purchase Class A common stock of CSS Entertainment, Variety’s report says.

Sony first acquired Crackle in 2006, making it one of the older free, ad-supported streaming services on the market. However, it has struggled to grow amid competition from sites like Netflix and the billions it and others – like Hulu, Amazon, and now Apple – are investing in original content. That led Sony to announce last year it would seek out new strategic partners to help it run Crackle.

The transfer of ownership for Crackle, however, arrives at a time when ad-free streaming services like this are seeing newfound interest, with Amazon’s launch of IMDb’s FreeDive, Roku’s The Roku Channel, Walmart’s Vudu, Viacom’s new addition Pluto, Tubi, and others now making gains.

As part of the deal, Sony will contribute its U.S. assets, including the Crackle brand, user base and ad rep business to the new venture, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It will also license movies and TV shows from the Sony Pictures Entertainment library to Crackle Plus, as well as Crackle’s original programming, like its shows “Start Up” and “The Oath,” for example.

CSS Entertainment will bring six of its ad-supported networks – including Popcornflix, Popcornflix Kids, Popcornflix Comedy, Frightpix, Espanolflix, and Truli, plus its subscription service Pivotshare – to Crackle Plus.

The combination will lead Crackle Plus to become one of the largest ad-supported video-on-demand platforms in the U.S., the companies claim, with nearly 10 million monthly active users and 26 million registered users. The new service will also have access to over 38,000 combined hours of programming, over 90 content partnerships, and over 100 networks.

“Our joint venture will position Crackle Plus as a leading AVOD streaming platform with nearly 10 million active users on our owned-and-operated networks. This will result in a manyfold increase in our recurring revenue from online networks,” said CSS Entertainment Chairman and CEO William J. Rouhana, Jr., in a statement. “We plan to build Crackle Plus aggressively and profitably through organic growth and acquisitions.”

Current Crackle GM and Sony chief digital officer Eric Berger will exit Crackle when the deal closes.

It’s not uncommon to hear CEOs and business leaders talk about focusing on the consumer. But the only way to build for the consumer is to hear what they want, which can be a resource-intensive thing to retrieve.

User Interviews, an ERA-backed company out of New York, is looking to lighten that load with a fresh $5 million in seed funding from Accomplice, Las Olas, FJ Labs, and ERA.

User Interviews actually started out as Mobile Suites, an amenities logistics platform for hotels. It was a dud, and the team — Basel Fakhoury, Dennis Meng and Bob Saris — decided to do far more user research before determining the next product.

In the process of talking to customers to understand their pain points, they realized just how difficult collecting user feedback could be.

That’s how User Interviews was born. The platform’s first product, called Recruit, offers a network of non-users that can be matched with companies to provide feedback. In fact, User Interviews’ first sales were made by simply responding to Craigslist ads posted by companies looking for non-users from which they could collect feedback.

But because the majority of user research is based on existing users, the company also built Research Hub, which is essentially a CRM system for user feedback and research. To be clear, User Interviews doesn’t facilitate the actual emails sent to users, but does track the feedback and make sure that no one from the research team is reaching out to a single user too often.

With Recruit, User Interviews charges $30/person that it matches with a company for feedback. Research Hub costs starts at $150/month.

“Right now, our greatest challenge is that our clients are the best product people in the world, and we have a huge pipeline of amazing ideas that are very valuable and no one is doing yet that our clients would love,” said CEO and founder Basel Fakhoury. “But we have to build it fast enough.”

No mention of what those forthcoming products might be, but the current iteration sure seems attractive enough. User Interviews clients include Eventbrite, Glassdoor, AT&T, DirecTV, Lola, LogMeIn, Thumbtack, Casper, ClassPass, Fandango, NNG, Pinterest, Pandora, Colgate, Uber and REI, to name a few.