Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Tribe, which helps brands acquire content from so-called “micro-influencers,” has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.

The startup was founded in Australia in 2015 by TV and radio host Jules Lund, who told me he was responding to the growing demand for branded content.

“Brands are desperate for content,” Lund said. “When you have a hundred customer profiles and the ability to be hyper personalized and targeted and social, you now need 100 beautiful pieces of content. Creative agencies can’t supply that at the right cost and the right turnaround, and stock image are the antithesis of personalization, because they don’t feature your brand.”

As for how Tribe differs from all the other influencer marketing companies out there, Lund noted that it’s a purely self-serve product, where brands post their requests — either for an “influencer campaign,” where the influencers are creating content and promoting it to their followers, or a “content campaign,” which is just about creating the content — then users submit their work and get paid if the brand decides to use it.

Plus, the brands on the platform aren’t sending free stuff to influencers who may or may not be a good fit. Instead, Tribe is connecting them with influencers who already own (and presumably like) their products.

“Tribe’s role is to simply unlock all of that branded content that sits within people’s iPhones and Samsungs,” Lund said. “The micro-influencers are looking in their pantry or their wardrobe, looking at the apps in their phones, all of these products that they already use.”

Tribe says it’s already working with brands like Unilever, L’Oreal and Marvel and generating more than $250,000 worth of branded content every day. And while the United Kingdom is currently the company’s biggest market, the United States already accounts for 20 percent of the more than 50,000 influencers on the platform.

With the new funding, Tribe is officially launching in the U.S. and opening an office at One World Trade Center in Manhattan, which will be led by CEO Anthony Svirskis. He said the money will also allow Tribe to continue investing in its product.

“With TRIBE we’re finally seeing influencer marketing done right,” said Chris Burch, founder and CEO of investor Burch Creative Capital, in a statement. “The U.S. market has been waiting for a tech platform like this for years and as soon as we heard they were launching stateside, we knew we needed to be a part of it.”

 

Marketing analytics is an increasingly complex business. It’s meant to collect as much information as possible across multiple channels from multiple tools and provide marketers with as complete a picture of their customers and their experience in dealing with you as possible. Perhaps not coincidentally, Adobe, which is holding its Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas, and Salesforce both made Customer Data Platform (CDP) announcements this week.

The Customer Data Platform is a complex construct, but it’s basically a marketer’s dream, a central database that pulls customer data from variety of channels and disparate data sources to give marketeers deep insight into their customers, all with the hope of gathering enough data to serve the perfect experience. As always the ultimate goal is happy repeat customers, who build brand loyalty.

It always comes down to experience for marketers these days and that involves serving up the right kind of experience. You don’t want the first-time visitor to have the same experience as a loyal customer. You don’t want a business customer to have the same experience as the consumer. All of that takes lots and lots of information, and when you want to make those experiences even more personalized in real-time, it’s a tough problem to solve.

Part of the problem is that customers are working across multiple channels and marketers are using multiple tools from a variety of vendors. When you combine those two problems, it’s hard to collect all of the data on a given customer.

The process is a bit like boiling the ocean and to complicate matters even further it involves anonymized data and non-anonymized data about customers being stored in the same database. Imagine those two elements being hacked. It wouldn’t be pretty, which is just one reason that these kinds of platforms are so difficult to build.

Yet the promise of having a central data hub like this is so tantalizing, and the amount of data growing so quickly, that having a tool to help pull it all together could have great utility for marketers. Armed with this kind of information, it could enable marketers to build what Salesforce’s Bob Stutz called “hyper-targeted messages” in a blog post yesterday.

Stutz used that same blog post to announce Salesforce’s CDP offering, which is not the same as the Customer 360 product announced at Dreamforce last year, although you would be forgiven for confusing the two. “Salesforce Customer 360 helps companies easily connect and resolve customer data across Salesforce and 3rd party applications with a single customer ID. Our Customer Data Platform builds on this unified identity foundation to deliver a “single view of the customer” for marketing professionals,” Stutz wrote.

Adobe, which announced its CDP use case today, sees it in somewhat similar terms, but its approach is different, says Matt Skinner, product marketing manager for the Adobe Audience Manager product. For starters, it’s powered by the Adobe Experience Platform and “brings together known and unknown data to activate real-time customer profiles across channels throughout the customer journey,” Skinner said. In addition, he says it can use AI to help build these experiences and augment marketer ideas.

Both companies have to pull in data from their own systems, as well as external systems to make this work. That kind of integration problem is one of the reasons that Salesforce bought Mulesoft last year for $6.5 billion, but Skinner says that Adobe is taking its own open API approach to the problem.”Adobe’s platform is open and extensible with APIs and an extensive partner ecosystem, so data and applications can really come from anywhere,” he said.

Regardless, both vendors are working hard to make this happen, and it will be interesting to see how each one plays to its strengths to bring this data together. It’s clearly going to be a huge data integration and security challenge, and both companies will have to move carefully to protect the data as they build this kind of system.

Google announced today it will expand its office space in Taiwan with a new complex in Banqiao District, New Taipei City. The space will be in Taipei Far Eastern Telecom Park, about a 20-minute drive away from its offices in Taipei 101. Google currently has 2,000 employees in the country and plans to hire several hundred more, with an emphasis on hiring more women, said Rick Osterloh, Google’s senior vice president of hardware, during a press conference today.

The complex will also play an important role in Google’s Intelligent Taiwan project, which it announced in May 2018. Last year, the project trained about 5,000 students in AI technology and 50,000 digital marketers.

In the wake of Project Dragonfly, Google’s controversial project to build a censored version of its search engine for China, close attention will be paid to what the company does in Taiwan and its other hubs in Asia. Google reportedly halted Dragonfly last year, before employees told The Intercept that they had seen evidence of continued work on the project. A Google spokesperson said there was no link between those issues and the expansion of its Taiwan offices.

After Google completed its $1.1 billion acquisition of a large part of HTC’s smartphone unit at the beginning of 2018, Taiwan became its biggest Asian engineering hub. Google pulled out of China in 2010, citing censorship issues, and the revelation of Project Dragonfly, an apparent reversal on its earlier stance, was met with controversy internally by Google employees. The company’s potential re-launch in China was also one of the main topics of questioning during CEO Sundar Pichai’s House Judiciary committee hearing in December.

Update: The issue appears to have been fixed.

While you’ll have to wait for a not-yet-announced date to pay a not-yet-announced price for several of the subscription services that Apple announced yesterday, Apple News+ actually launched pretty quickly … and then started crashing.

At least, that was my experience this morning after I updated my iPad to iOS 12.2, then reinstalled and opened the News app. The app started loading, then kicked me out a few seconds later. Then it did it again, and again, and again.

It’s not clear how widespread the issue is, but my colleague Matt Burns had a similar experience on his iPhone 8, and a number of other users seem to be tweeting about their own crashes on iPads, iPhones and Macs.

There are, however, reports that you can circumvent the issue by immediately selecting the News+ tab and letting it load.

In fact, I managed to do that myself, so that I could sign-up for the new $9.99 subscription (which includes TechCrunch’s own Extra Crunch). I appear to have subscribed successfully — only to have the app start crashing on me again.

Not the most auspicious start for a paid product, and one that’s already spurring debate about whether or not it can help the news industry.

The European Parliament has voted to pass a controversial reform of online copyright rules that critics contend will result in big tech platforms pre-filtering user generated content uploads.

The results of the final vote in the EU parliament were 348 in favor vs 274 against.

An amendment that would have thrown out the most controversial component of the copyright reform — aka Article 13, which makes platforms liable for copyright infringements committed by their users — was rejected by just five votes.

In an earlier vote last fall the EU Parliament also backed the copyright reform proposal, passing negotiations to the EU Council. Months of closed door negotiations followed between representatives of EU Member States and institutions, in so called trilogue discussions, culminating in a final text being agreed last month — which was then handed back to parliament for its final vote today.

Tweaks to the reform agreed by Member States agreed during trilogue appear intended to address criticism that it imposes so-called ‘upload filters’ by default — instead requiring larger platforms to obtain licences for certain types of protected content ahead of time. Though critics still aren’t impressed.

Speaking out against the proposals in the parliament ahead of the vote, Pirate Party member and MEP Julia Reda, who is part of Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance in the EU parliament, highlighted the scale of popular protests against the copyright reform, saying 200,000 people attended demonstrations in the region this weekend and five million have signed a petition against the reform — claiming there has “never been such broad protest” against an EU directive.

She also accused of the parliament of “thoroughly ignoring” the popular protests and warned it risks convincing young people there’s no point in engaging with democratic protest.

“The most tragic thing about this process is a new generation who are voting in the European elections for the first time this year are learning a lesson: Your protests aren’t worth anything, politics will spread lies about you, and won’t care for factual arguments if geopolitical interests are at stake,” said Reda in an impassioned speech in parliament this afternoon ahead of the vote.

Her speech was interrupted several times by shouts from other MEPs disagreeing.

Freedom of expression vs creative industry

The copyright reform campaign has been massively polarized throughout, with one side claiming it means the end of the free Internet and the death of memes because it will result in all online uploads being pre-filtered; and the other accusing opponents they’re in the pay of tech giants which they accuse of freeloading and leaching off Europe’s creative industries by monetizing copyrighted content without paying for use.

Both sides have also accused each other of spreading disinformation to further their cause. There’s been zero love lost across this divide as lobbyists from the two sides have piled on (and on).

Another element of the reform, Article 11, is a proposal to extend digital copyright to cover the ledes of news stories — which aggregators such as Google News scrape and display.

Unsurprisingly that measure has strong support among European media giants like Axel Springer and critics of the reform accuse its architects of being in hock to the newspaper industry which hopes to benefit financially by being able to charge link aggregator platforms like Google for displaying its content in future.

In recent years a couple of individual EU member states have passed similar laws to extend copyright to news snippets — which led Google to pull Google News entirely from Spain, while in Germany publishers ended up providing their snippets for free. An EU-wide rule could change the dynamics, though.

It’s certainly a much bigger business decision for Google to pull the plug on Google News across the whole of Europe, rather than just in Spain. Though, equally, Google could just come up with a compliance workaround to evade the requirement to pay.

Less discussed elements of the reform include proposals around text and data mining (TDM), which have implications for AI research — including a mandatory copyright exceptions for TDM conducted for research purposes. Teaching and educational purposes are also exempt. But rightholders can opt out of having their works datamined by entities other than research organisations.

The European Commission’s VP for the Digital Single Market tweeted in support of the parliament’s vote today — dubbing it a “big step ahead” which he said will reduce fragmentation across the bloc.

But in a follow up tweet he sought to address concerns that the reform will chill freedom of expression online, writing: “I know there are lots of fears about what users can do or not – now we have clear guarantees for #FreedomOfSpeech, teaching and online creativity. Member States must make full use of these safeguards in national law.”

In a press release following the parliament’s vote the Commission confirms the text will need to be formally endorsed by the Council of the European Union — which will take place via another vote in the coming weeks, so likely early next month.

Assuming the Council gives its thumbs up the final text will be been published on the Official Journal of the EU, and Member States will then have 24 months to transpose the rules into their national legislation. So the timetable for the copyright directive coming into force is likely 2021.

An accompanying Commission memo on the directive also seeks to address some of the criticisms, with the Commission claiming it “protects freedom of expression [and] sets strong safeguards for users, making clear that everywhere in Europe the use of existing works for purposes of quotation, criticism, review, caricature as well as parody are explicitly allowed”.

“This means that memes and similar parody creations can be used freely. The interests of the users are also preserved through effective mechanisms to swiftly contest any unjustified removal of their content by the platforms,” it adds, in what critics will surely dub cold comfort attempts to paper over the overarching chilling effect on expression from pushing content liability onto platforms.

In another section of the memo, the Commission also writes that the directive does not “impose uploading filters” — nor add any specific technology to recognise illegal content.

“Under the new rules, certain online platforms will be required to conclude licensing agreements with right holders — for example, music or film producers — for the use of music, videos or other copyright protected content. If licences are not concluded, these platforms will have to make their best efforts to ensure that content not authorised by the right holders is not available on their website. The “best effort” obligation does not prescribe any specific means or technology,” it writes.

Though, again, critics argue that will simply translate into upload filters in practice anyway — as platforms will be encouraged to “over-comply” with the rules to “stay on the safe side”, as Reda tells it.

Also critical of the reform, former MEP Catherine Stihler, who’s now CEO of an open data advocacy not-for-profit, called the Open Knowledge Foundation.

In a reaction statement she dubbed the vote “a massive blow for every internet user in Europe”. “We now risk the creation of a more closed society at the very time we should be using digital advances to build a more open world where knowledge creates power for the many, not the few,” she suggested.

Following the vote, Tal Niv, GitHub’s VP of law and policy, also took a critical but more nuanced position, writing: “We’re thankful that policymakers listened and excluded ‘open source software developing and sharing platforms’ from the potential requirement to implement upload filters, which would have made the software ecosystem more fragile. However, the Directive that passed still contains challenges for developers.”

“Anyone developing a platform with EU users that involves sharing links or content faces great uncertainty. The ramifications include being unable to develop features that web users currently expect, and having to implement very expensive and inaccurate automated filtering. On the other hand, inclusion of a mandatory copyright exception for text and data mining in the Directive is welcome, and puts EU developers on a more even playing field relative to their US peers in the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence; looking ahead it will be crucial for member states to implement this exception in a consistent fashion.”

The Computer & Communications Industry Association reacted with disappointment too, warning in a statement that Article 13 undermines the legality of the social and sharing tools and websites that Europeans use every day and saying the reform falls short of “a balanced and modern framework for copyright” despite citing some “recent improvements”.

“We fear it will harm online innovation and restrict online freedoms in Europe. We urge Member States to thoroughly assess and try to minimize the consequences of the text when implementing it,” added Maud Sacquet, CCIA Europe’s senior policy manager.

Monique Goyens, director general of The European Consumer Organisation, BEUC, also described it as a “very unbalanced copyright law”.

“Despite the warnings and concerns of academics, privacy bodies, UN representatives and hundreds of thousands of consumers across Europe, the European Parliament has given its go-ahead to a very unbalanced copyright law. Consumers will have to bear the consequences of this decision,” she warned.

On the flip side professional content creators were jubilant.

“Through this historic vote, a message was sent by Europe to the world, in favour of culture, creation, authors, artists and journalists, and their right to fair remuneration in the digital world,” wrote the Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music in a wordy statement that goes into detail in an attempt to rebut specific various laid charges against the reform. (Such as pointing out that the final text of Article 13 includes an exception for startups — “whose growth will be promoted by clarifying their situation for the use of content protected by authors’ rights”, it suggests.)

“This vote was an act of European sovereignty and a victory for democracy, because it was possible despite one of the most violent campaigns of lobbying and disinformation in the history of the European Union, on the part of those who wanted at all costs to avoid adopting a balanced text,” it added.

In an analysis following the vote law firm Linklaters’ Kathy Berry suggests the controversy and polarization around the copyright reform debate is part of a broader “Hollywood v Silicon Valley” tension — between “content creators that want a high level of copyright protection based on traditional models, and the tech industry that wants to clear the path for new and innovative ways to use and share content”.

“While Article 13 may have noble aims, in its current it functions as little more than a set of ideals, with very little guidance on exactly which service providers will be caught by it or what steps will be sufficient to comply,” she writes delving into the implications for big tech. “This is likely to result in an ongoing lack of legal and commercial certainty until the scope of the Directive is fleshed out by either the Commission’s proposed guidance or by European jurisprudence.”

On Article 11 extending copyright to news snippets Berry says the final version of the text is “much watered down” — noting that it excludes both hyperlinks and “very short extracts” of publications — going on to suggest it’s “unlikely to have any significant impact on news aggregators like Google News after all”.

When 500 Startups partner Hasan Haider announced the $15 million first close for the accelerator and investment firm’s Middle Eastern focused fund, 500 Falcons, Dave McClure was still at the helm of Silicon Valley’s second most famous accelerator.

Within a month, McClure was removed from the accelerator after admitting to sexual misconduct and 500 Startups started reckoning with the ramifications of his actions.

Over the course of 2018, 500 saw some successes among its international operations, ending the year with $454 million committed across multiple funds, according to the company’s chief executive, Christine Tsai. The firm’s international operations kept humming with 500 Vietnam raising $14 million in an oversubscribed close and the Southeast Asian-focused fund, 500 TukTuks II, holding their initial close.

Now, with its oversubscribed close of $33 million, 500 Falcons joins the ranks of geographically focused, 500-affiliated, investment firms to raise capital as the firm’s scandal recedes from view.

In the intervening years since the launch of 500 Falcons and the fund’s final close, the argument for investing in the Middle East and North Africa has only become more clear.

The trend-line for investments in the Middle East continues to move up and to the right. Last year there were 366 investments made in Middle Eastern startups — the highest number on record. And those deals managed to raise 31% more than their 2017 total, with $893 million in capital committed, according to the region’s industry tracker, Magnitt.

Earlier this morning, Uber added a $3.1 billion rationale for Middle East investors with its acquisition of the regional ride-hailing service, Careem.

The region’s potential for growth was even mentioned in the statement from Careem’s chief executive and co-founder, Mudassir Sheikha. when he discussed the acquisition.

“Joining forces with Uber will help us accelerate Careem’s purpose of simplifying and improving the lives of people, and building an awesome organisation that inspires,” he said. “The mobility and broader internet opportunity in the region is massive and untapped, and has the potential to leapfrog our region into the digital future.”

The 500 Falcons fund has also seen more modest successes of its own.

One portfolio company, the Dubai-based transcription and note-taking service, Wrappup was acquired by Voicera for an undisclosed amount. And the firm has seen follow on funding for its portfolio companies Souqalmal, a price comparison site for consumer lending and insurance; Jamalon, the region’s largest online retailer of Arabic and English books; and Foodics, a point of sale system for restaurants.

In all, the firm has invested in 105 startups since its launch.

From its inception, the 500 Falcons fund has taken a holistic approach to investing in the region, according to Haider.

“The region has long faced political and economic uncertainty, and a growing younger population that is looking to take charge and change things with their own hands. These youth have access to the same global wealth of information as anyone else. If they so choose, they’re capable of achieving the same things anyone else in the world is,” Haider wrote in 2017.

“The Middle East and North Africa are among the last large regional ecosystems to rise up, and emerging markets tend to leapfrog adoption of innovations and technology at higher and higher frequencies. Being a latecomer does not mean staying behind, and the Arabic speaking world is 500 million strong – young, resourceful, wealthy and a yearning to thrive.”

Huawei held a press conference today in Paris. And the company just unveiled its brand new flagship phone — the P30 and the P30 Pro. In many ways, this year’s update is a continuation of the P20 series — but everything has been upgraded. I played with both devices for a bit of time yesterday, here’s my experience.

While Huawei’s sub-brand Honor has switched to a hole-punch design, Huawei is keeping the good old notch for its flagship device. But this year’s notch is a lot smaller. The company has switched from an iPhone X-like notch to a tiny little teardrop notch.

The P20 and P20 Pro were the last flagship phones to feature a fingerprint sensor below the display, on the front of the device. With the P30 series, Huawei is removing that odd-looking bezel and integrating the fingerprint sensor in the display.

The company could have used that opportunity to make the phones smaller. But Huawei opted for taller displays instead. The P20 and P20 Pro had 5.8-inch and 6.1-inch displays with a 18.7:9 aspect ratio. The P30 and P30 Pro have gigantic 6.1-inch and 6.47-inch displays with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio.

The P30 Pro is still narrower than the iPhone XR, but it won’t be for everyone. It definitely feels too big in my hand for instance.

The industrial design of the P30 series is in line with the P20 series. The phones feature a glass on the back with colorful gradients. The frame is made of aluminum. Overall, the devices feel slimmer on the edges thanks to curved back and front glasses. The company has flattened the top and bottom edges of the devices as well. Everything feels solid in your hand.

The P30 and P30 Pro are now closer when it comes to features. They both have an OLED display with a 2340*1080 resolution for instance. You no longer have to choose between an LCD and an OLED display.

The two biggest differences you can spot is that the P30 Pro has a Samsung-style display, slightly curved on the sides — the P30 displays is completely flat. Huawei is also bringing back the headphone jack, but only for the P30. It doesn’t really make sense to segment the lineup this way, but maybe Huawei considers you have enough money to buy wireless earbuds if you’re in the market for a P30 Pro.

Both devices come in five colors — Breathing Crystal, Amber Sunrise, Perl White, Black and Aurora. Amber Sunrise is a red to orange gradient color, Breathing Crystal is a white-to-purple gradient, Perl White is a white-to-slightly pink gradient, Aurora is a blue-to-turquoise gradient.

You’ll be able to buy the P30 for €799 ($900) with 128GB of storage and the P30 Pro for €999 ($1,130) for 128GB of storage — there are more expensive options for the P30 Pro with more storage. The phones will be available in Europe and Asia today, and probably won’t be released in the U.S.

Four camera sensors, because why not

When it comes to cameras, Huawei has always been one of the leading smartphone manufacturers on this front. There are only four brands that ship cameras that perform so well — Apple, Samsung, Google and Huawei.

It’s going to be hard to comment on the quality of the photos after so little hands-on time, but the P30 Pro now features not one, not two, not three but f-o-u-r sensors on the back of the device.

• The main camera is a 40 MP 27mm sensor with an f/1.6 aperture and optical image stabilization.
• There’s a 20MP ultra-wide angle lens (16mm) with an f/2.2 aperture.
• The 8 MP telephoto lens provides nearly 5x optical zoom compared to the main lens (125mm) with an f/3.4 aperture and optical image stabilization.
• There’s a new time-of-flight sensor below the flash of the P30 Pro. The phone projects infrared light and captures the reflection with this new sensor.

Thanks to the new time-of-flight sensor, Huawei promises better bokeh effects with a new depth map. The company also combines the main camera sensor with the telephoto sensor to let you capture photos with a 10x zoom with a hybrid digital-optical zoom.

The telephoto lens uses a periscope design. It means that the sensor features a glass to beam the light at a right angle. Huawei uses that method to avoid making the phone too thick.

On the P30, the cameras are more or less the same, but a bit worse:

• A 40 MP main sensor with an f/1.8 aperture and optical image stabilization.
• A 16 MP ultra-wide angle lens with an f/2.2 aperture.
• An 8 MP telephoto lens that should provide 3x optical zoom.
• No time-of-flight sensor.

More than hardware specifications, Huawei says that software has been greatly improved to enhance the quality of your photos. In particular, night mode should be much better thanks to optical and software-enabled stabilization. HDR shots and portrait photos should look better too.

On the front of the device, the selfie camera sensor has been upgraded from 24 MP to 32 MP. And you can capture HDR and low light photos from the front camera as well.

Below the surface

Huawei has upgraded its homemade system-on-a-chip with the Kirin 980 that you can find in the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro. It runs Android Pie 9.1 with Huawei’s EMUI custom Android user interface.

In addition to 40W USB-C charging, Huawei is integrating wireless charging for the first time in the P series (up to 15W). The P30 Pro has a 4,200 mAh battery. You can also charge other devices with reverse wireless charging, just like on the Samsung Galaxy S10.

The P30 Pro is IP68 water and dust resistant while the P30 is IP53 resistant.

You won’t find a speaker grill at the top of the P30 Pro because the company has removed the speaker. Instead, Huawei is vibrating the screen in order to turn the screen into a tiny speaker for your calls.

A note on the Huawei FreeLace wireless earphones

Huawei is also launching new in-ear earbuds today. The FreeLace looks more or less like the BeatsX with a cord behind your neck. You can disconnect the cord and plug your wireless earphones directly into your smartphone to pair them – no Bluetooth pairing required.

That hidden USB-C port is also how you’re going to charge the earbuds. For 5 minutes of charge time, you get 4 hours worth of playback. They’ll be available in four colors — Graphite Black, Amber Sunrise, Emerald Green and Moonlight Silver.

The earbuds are magnetic so you can wrap them around your neck. When you disconnect them, it automatically answers your calls, play your music. When you connect them again, it hangs up or pause your music. The FreeLace earbuds will be a separate accessory for €99.

Hello Alfred — the startup that assigns in-home assistants to take care of your recurring chores and tasks — has announced the launch of a new service tier that will provide more properties and residents with access to the company’s underlying technology.

The company, which won the Startup Battlefield competition at our 2014 Disrupt event in San Francisco, looks to unlock valuable time for users by handling the long list of small routine items that add up over the course of a week and still require human oversight.

Hello Alfred partners with building owners to provide residents with dedicated home managers that assist with various errands and on-request services, such as apartment cleaning, grocery delivery, laundry services, prescription refills and more. Users have a direct line of communication with the company’s hospitality team through Hello Alfred’s mobile app, where they can manage tasks and set recurring appointments.

The new platform, “Powered by Alfred,” acts as a fairly similar but more accessible alternative to the company’s current offering. Residents in buildings equipped with “Powered by Alfred” are given access to all of the company’s solutions with the exception of the weekly visits from dedicated home managers currently included in the existing service. By excluding the dedicated in-home service, Hello Alfred is able to offer its new service tier at a lower price point and integrate with more buildings faster. 

Property owners using “Powered by Alfred” can customize packages to include the services that best fit the needs of their residents and can upgrade or change service levels at any time. Both residents and building owners using the new platform are also given more control and direct access to Hello Alfred’s proprietary technology, allowing users to control functions that normally fall under the purview of the company’s dedicated home managers.

Additionally, with the launch of the new offering, Hello Alfred will be consolidating its various solutions under one central app, where residents and building managers can handle all inquiries, appointments and payments.

The launch of “Powered by Alfred” seems to be a natural evolution for the company, which seeks to make its offering more accessible to all residents of all backgrounds.

Hello Alfred previously employed a consumer-facing business model, in which customers would pay a monthly subscription fee for the array of in-home services and access to the company’s team of hospitality specialists, referred to as Alfreds.

However, around the time of the startup’s Series B round, Hello Alfred adopted the model of partnering directly with property owners to offer its services complimentary to residents. The partnership structure was not only a more conducive model for scaling but also enabled the company to offer the same services to any resident in an Alfred-equipped building, regardless of socioeconomic status.

Hello Alfred quickly built up a sizeable backlog of property owners hoping to integrate the platform into their units, according to the company. However, the task of maintaining dedicated staffing for every unit in every location made it difficult for the Alfred team to satisfy its swelling demand, having to instead focus resources primarily on luxury properties.

With “Powered by Alfred” removing in-home management services, the company has been able to improve accessibility and better satisfy the market’s appetite for its services, now rolling out the offering to non-luxury buildings and properties that previously sat in its pipeline.

Behind the launch of the new platform — which the company has piloted over the course of several months — Hello Alfred has increased its market share by more than 50 percent, with its services now available in more than 150,000 residential properties.

“We want Alfred to be a utility. We want to make “help” a universal utility and make it something anyone can access,” Hello Alfred CEO and co-founder Marcela Sapone told TechCrunch. “We wanted to find a way where we could accelerate growth and get human-focused help into urban buildings to help most urban environments.”

The launch represents the latest step in Hello Alfred’s broader expansion plans, which appear to have ramped up in recent months. Hello Alfred is now active in 16 cities — including Houston, where the company plans to launch next week — with its new offering available across all of its active markets. The startup already boasts an impressive partnership roster that includes more than 20 of the largest property owners in the U.S., and the Alfred team expects its new offering to open up further opportunities for partnerships across different property classes and different stages of a resident’s life cycle.

“As WeWork transformed commercial real estate, Hello Alfred is transforming residential real estate, and redefining what it means to live in a city today,” said Sapone. “This business expansion allows us to not only satisfy increasing demand for our service, but to connect every part of the resident experience — from the moment you sign your lease, until the moment you move to another Hello Alfred building.”

To date, the company has raised just over $63.5 million in venture capital, according to data from PitchBook, from prestigious investment brands that include New Enterprise Associates, Spark Capital, SV Angel, Moderne Ventures, Invesco and others.

Today at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, Adobe announced some enhancements to its Analytics Suite that are supposed to help marketers understand their customers more deeply, including a new tool to track the entire customer journey, and one to help see the relationship between advertising and marketing success, which is surprisingly harder than you would think to understand.

The first is called Journey IQ, and as the name suggests, the idea is to provide a better understanding of the entire customer journey. That in itself isn’t new. It’s a task that marketing analytics vendors have been trying to solve for more than 10 years.

John Bates, director of product marketing for Adobe Analytics, says that understanding the customer journey can help focus marketing efforts in the future, and this tool is designed to help. “It’s really focused on helping find a complete view of a past experience and helping separate those good experiences or moments from the bad,” he explained.

Adobe wants to provide actionable data and analysis to help users understand what happened as their customers engaged with their site, in order to provide better experiences in the future. For marketing vendors, it’s always about the experience and the more data focused on understanding that experience, the more vendors believe their customers will have greater success.

This solution involves looking at elements like churn analysis, time-lapsed analysis to follow the journey step by step and look back and look forward kinds of analytics, all with a goal of giving marketers as much information as they can to turn that visit into positive action in the future. For marketers, that means you end the journey next time by buying (more) stuff.

The second piece is Adobe Advertising Cloud, a new product which allows marketers to see the connection between their advertising and the success of their marketing campaigns. Given the insight digital advertising is supposed to provide marketers about the ads they are serving, you would think they would be getting that already, but advertising and marketing often operate in technology silos making it hard to put the data together to see the big picture.

Adobe wants to help marketers see the connections between the ads they are serving customers and the actions the customers take when they come to the company web site. It can help give insight and understanding in to how effectively your advertising strategy is translating into consumer action.

Taken together, these two analytics tools are designed to help marketers understand how and why the customer came to the site, what actions they took when they got there, and give deeper insight into why they took an action or not.

In a world where it’s all about building positive customer experiences with the goal of driving more sales and more satisfied customers, understanding these kinds of relationships can be crucial, but keep in mind it’s challenging to understand all of this as it’s happening, even with tools like these.

Adobe today announced the launch of its Commerce Cloud, the newest part of the company’s Experience Cloud. Unsurprisingly, the Commerce Cloud builds on the company’s $1.68 billion acquisition of Magento last May. Indeed, at its core, the Adobe Commerce Cloud is essentially a fully managed cloud-based version of the Magento platform that is fully integrated with the rest of Adobe’s tools, including its Analytics Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Advertising Cloud.

With this launch, Adobe is also extending the platform by adding new features like dashboards for keeping an eye on a company’s e-commerce strategy and, for the first time, an integration with the Amazon marketplace from which users will be able to directly manage within the Commerce Cloud interface.

“For Adobe, that’s really important because it actually closes the last mile in its Experience offering,” said Jason Woosley, Adobe’s VP of its commerce product and platform and Magento’s former VP of product and technology. “It’s no mystery that they’ve been looking at commerce offerings in the past. We’re just super glad that they settled on us.”

Woosley also stressed that this new product isn’t just about closing the last mile for Adobe from a commerce perspective but also from a data intelligence perspective.”If you think about behavioral data you get from your interactions with our content, that’s all very critical for understanding how your customers are interacting with your brand,” he said. “But now that we’ve got a commerce offering, we are actually able to put the dollars and cents behind that.”

Adobe notes that this new offering also means that Magento users won’t have to worry about the operational aspects of running the service themselves. To ensure that it can manage this for these customers, the company has tweaked the service to be flexible and scalable on its platform.

Woosley also stressed the importance of the Amazon integration that launches with the Commerce Cloud. “Love it or hate it,” he said of Amazon. “Either you are comfortable participating in those marketplaces or you are not, but at the end of the day, they are capturing more and more of the initial product search.” Commerce Cloud users will be able to pick and choose which parts of their inventory will appear on Amazon and at what prices. Plenty of brands, after all, only want to showcase a selection of their products on Amazon to drive their brand awareness and then drive customers back to their own e-commerce stores.

It’s worth noting that all of the usual Magento extensions will work on the Adobe Commerce Cloud. That’s important given that there are more than 350,000 developers in the Magento ecosystem, plus thousands of partners. With that, the Commerce Cloud can cover quite a few use cases that wouldn’t be important enough for Adobe itself to put its own resources behind but that make the platform attractive for a wider range of potential users.