Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Pinterest has committed to adopting the recommendations from its special committee of the Board of Directors, the company wrote in a blog post today. The committee formed earlier this year in June, shortly after two former employees, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, went public with their allegations of racial and gender discrimination while working at Pinterest.

The committee, which retained law firm WilmerHale to conduct a workplace review, spoke with more than 350 current and former employees to make its recommendations geared toward improving diversity, equity and inclusion at Pinterest. Here are a few of those recommendations:

• mandatory unconscious bias training for every employee, including managers and executives
• offer additional trainings on inclusivity and unconscious bias
• include “diverse employees” in interview panels with job candidates
• reward employees for their efforts to support and promote DEI
• publish a diversity report twice a year for at least two years; after two years, publish the report annually
• establish criteria for promotion eligibility
• enhance Pinterest’s harassment and discrimination policy
• create a centralized workplace investigations team to ensure consistent and fair outcomes

You can see all of the recommendations here. Pinterest, in a statement to TechCrunch, said it’s committed to making those changes.

“We value our employees and know it’s our responsibility to build a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment for everyone at Pinterest,” a Pinterest spokesperson said. “Because we understand the urgency for change, we have taken actions over the past months to ensure everyone at Pinterest feels safe, welcomed and championed and believe we’re on a path to ensuring a culture where all employees feel included and supported.”

In a note to employees, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said that everyone at the company will have an opportunity to discuss the recommendations and ask questions later this week. Silberman also said he felt encouraged that many of the suggestions “mirror efforts we already have underway to build a culture where all employees feel included and supported.”

Earlier this week, Pinterest settled a gender discrimination lawsuit with former COO Francoise Brougher for $22.5 million. But that hefty payout highlighted some of the inequities in tech. Brougher filed her lawsuit in August, after Ozoma and Banks went public with their allegations. While Brougher walked away with millions, Ozoma and Banks received less than one year’s worth of severance.

“So we, like in many, many, many other cases, Black women put ourselves on the line, shared absolutely everything that happened to us, then laid the groundwork for someone else to swoop in and collect ‘progress,’ ” Ozoma previously told TechCrunch. “No progress has been made here because no rights have been made with people who harm has been done to.”

A few weeks after announcing that iOS support was on the way, Google’s cloud gaming service now supports the iPhone and iPad. As expected, the company is using a web app to access the service. Google also says that you need to update to iOS 14.3, the latest iOS update that was released earlier this week.

If you want to try it out with a free or paid Stadia account, you can head over to stadia.google.com from your iOS device. Log in to your Google account, add a shortcut to your home screen and open the web app.

After that, you can launch a game and start playing. Most games will require a gamepad, so you might want to pair a gamepad with your iPhone or iPad as well.

Apple’s iOS supports Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers using Bluetooth as well as controllers specifically designed for iOS. You can also play with the Stadia controller, but it’s optional. If you just want to check your inventory quickly, Stadia on iOS also supports touch controls.

Stadia works a bit like a console that runs in the cloud. You have to buy games for the platform specifically and you can then stream them from a data center near you. Recent additions include Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

While you don’t have to pay an additional subscription to play those games, you can optionally become a Stadia Pro subscribers. In addition to games you bought on the platform, it lets you access a library of games and it unlocks 4K video. Stadia Pro costs $9.99 per month.

In other Stadia news, earlier this week, Ubisoft announced that you could subscribe to the company’s unlimited subscription service Ubisoft+ and access games from Stadia. For now, it’s only available as a beta in the U.S.

Mike Folgner has had his share of success building video editing tools, having sold Jumpcut.com to Yahoo and SnappyTV to Twitter. But as he explained in a new Medium post, he still sees “unfinished business” in the video industry.

“Today, most major productivity software categories have made the leap from desktop software to the web,” Folgner wrote. “Despite significant progress in web technology, professional video tools have not made this leap. With WebGL, WASM, and other advancements this will change. We can now build performant, feature rich applications integrated with the fabric of the web.”

To create full-featured video editing software that works in the browser, Folgner has teamed up with Ryan Cunningham (his Jumpcut and SnappyTV co-founder) and Ashot Petrosian (who was a lead engineer at Jumpcut) to found a new startup called Tensil, which is currently taking signups for anyone who wants to test the alpha version of its first product Scenery. (And they’ve hired Chris Martin as their first key engineer.)

Tensil has raised $3.89 million in funding led by Freestyle VC, with participation from Precursor Ventures, Wireframe Ventures, Transmedia Capital, Uphonest Capital, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Kayvon Beykpour, Kevin Weil, Elizabeth Weil, Russ Fradin, Ross Walker, Joe Bernstein, Keith Coleman, David Pidwell, Ryan Peirce and Don Ryan.

Image Credits: Tensil

Since they’re still developing and testing the product, I didn’t get a chance to try Scenery for myself, but I got on a call with Folgner and Petrosian to discuss their plans.

“If you stop and think about what should a video editor be today, you won’t build the same tool that was built in the 1970s,” Petrosian told me.

For example, he said that rather than relying on the standard timeline view of existing video editors, Scenery will present a two-dimensional canvas, allowing editors to think “more like a graphic designer.”

More broadly, Petrosian said Scenery is meant to better reflect current video production and editing needs, helping teams produce videos more quickly and collaboratively. In fact, he suggested that describing Scenery as merely an editor is selling it short — it’s closer to “a video production system.”

Folgner added that by moving the process into the browser, Scenery can help non-editors get involved in the process, similar to the way that Figma brought new team members into the design process.

“We are really excited about rethinking video editing as a team sport,” he said.

After reaching a previous all-time high on November 30th, 2020 and December 1st, 2020, bitcoin is now trading well above $20,000 and has surpassed its previous peak price.

Bitcoin’s value has rapidly increased over the past two months. According to CoinMarketCap, you could buy one bitcoin for $11,500 on October 16th.

As I’m writing this post, you can buy one bitcoin for $20,775.72 — it represents a 7.27% increase compared to yesterday’s price. It is now priced well over $20,000 on all major exchanges.

You might remember the bitcoin frenzy from 2017. At the time, Bitcoin nearly reached $20,000 and crashed shortly after. As always, the fact that bitcoin has been going up doesn’t mean that it’ll go up in the future.

This time, the rally seems a bit different as there’s not as much hype around bitcoin. As we’re entering a long economic crisis, some institutional investors are looking for alternative assets — and bitcoin is one of them. Some people could choose to hold their crypto assets for a longer time.

Still, there are a lot of new bitcoin investors who purchased just a fraction of a bitcoin on consumer fintech apps, such as Square’s Cash App, Robinhood and Revolut. Let’s see how the market evolves in the coming months.

Image Credits: CoinMarketCap

It’s been more than two years since the Pentagon announced its $10 billion, decade long JEDI cloud contract, which was supposed to provide a pathway to technological modernization for U.S. armed forces. While Microsoft was awarded the contract in October 2019, Amazon went to court to protest that decision, and it has been in legal limbo ever since.

Yesterday marked another twist in this government procurement saga when Amazon released its latest legal volley, asking a judge to set aside the decision to select Microsoft. Its arguments are similar to ones it has made before, but this time takes aim at the Pentagon’s reevaluation process, which after reviewing the contract and selection process, still found in a decision released this past September that Microsoft had won.

Amazon believes that reevaluation was highly flawed, and subject to undue influence, bias and pressure from the president. Based on this, Amazon has asked the court to set aside the award to Microsoft .

The JEDI reevaluations and re-award decision have fallen victim to an Administration that suppresses the good-faith analysis and reasoning of career officials for political reasons — ultimately to the detriment of national security and the efficient and lawful use of taxpayer dollars. DoD has demonstrated again that it has not executed this procurement objectively and in good faith. This re-award should be set aside.

As you might imagine, Frank X. Shaw, corporate vice president for communications at Microsoft does not agree, believing his company won on merit and by providing the best price.

“As the losing bidder, Amazon was informed of our pricing and they realized they’d originally bid too high. They then amended aspects of their bid to achieve a lower price. However, when looking at all the criteria together, the career procurement officials at the DoD decided that given the superior technical advantages and overall value, we continued to offer the best solution,” Shaw said in a statement shared with TechCrunch.

As for Amazon, a spokesperson told TechCrunch, “We are simply seeking a fair and objective review by the court, regarding the technical errors, bias and political interference that blatantly impacted this contract award.”

And so it goes.

The Pentagon announced it was putting out a bid for a $10 billion, decade long contract in 2018, dubbing it JEDI, short for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. The procurement process has been mired in controversy from the start, and the size and scope of the deal has attracted widespread attention much more than your typical government contract. It brought with it claims of bias, particularly by Oracle, that the bidding process was designed to favor Amazon.

We are more than two years beyond the original announcement. We are more than year beyond the original award to Microsoft, and it still remains stuck in a court battle with two major tech companies continuing to snipe at one another. With neither likely to give in, it will be up to the court to decide the final outcome, and perhaps end this saga once and for all.

Note: The DoD did not respond to our request for comment. Should that change, we will update the story.

The budding venture studio being built inside M13 has signed PepsiCo as its first new corporate partner.

Through the deal, PepsiCo has agreed to bankroll the first founder-in-residence program from the New York and Los Angeles-based firm, which poached former Techstars Los Angeles managing director Anna Barber to lead its new initiative.

The initial M13 Launchpad program will leverage PepsiCo executives and advisors to take entrepreneurs-in-residence on a 12-week long program in ideating and launching a health and wellness-focused startup.

“Today there is a wealth of data available to consumers about their own health, and the movement toward home testing has put ownership over health data more firmly in their hands. This creates exciting opportunities for people to use nutrition even more effectively as a source of consistent, overall health and wellness,” Barber wrote in an email. “This spring, we will be looking at everything from snacks, meal replacement foods, drinks and supplements to software platforms for optimizing nutrition, and connected devices for collecting and managing data.”

It’s a deal that compliments work M13 is already doing alongside corporate partners like Procter & Gamble Ventures, which was instrumental in developing companies like include the premium beauty tech OPTE, Kindra’s menopause products and Bodewell for sensitive skin care.

Independently, the Launchpad program was able to build up Rae, which sells affordable women’s wellness products available at Target, Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters.

Under the 12 week virtual Launchpad program, entrepreneurs will receive a $10,000 monthly stipend and enough cash for testing product market fit when they graduate. Upon leaving the program, each company will also receive a small seed round to ensure that they can continue to grow the business, M13 said.

As businesses face a complex and evolving privacy landscape, a new tool called Privacy Grader can help them make sure they’re doing the right things.

The tool was created by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, as part of their new data compliance and security startup Ketch. (Chavez and Vaidya also founded the super{set} startup studio; Ketch is part of the super{set} portfolio.)

“The truth of the matter is that we’ve cared a lot about these issues for a long time,” Chavez said. “What’s different today, in 2020, versus say a decade ago … is that it’s become an existential imperative for businesses.”

In order to use Privacy Grader, you need to have an authenticated email address tied to the website that you want analyzed — so you shouldn’t be able to see your competitors’ grades.

Once your request and email address are validated, Vaidya said you should get an analysis back in under 24 hours, which will score your site across more than 50 different factors, including trackers, storage of personal data and overall compliance with GDPR, CCPA and other regulations.

For example, Chavez and Vaidya provided me with an analysis of TechCrunch, where we scored 56% overall (Chavez assured me that this “absolutely on par with what we’re seeing out there”). The report outlined the privacy experience for users in different countries and pointed to areas where we can do better.

Chavez emphasized that this isn’t meant to be the end of a company’s privacy discussion, but rather a high-level view that helps the product and legal teams know where to focus their attention.

“Think of the scores … as an X-ray, not an MRI,” he said. “They’re indicative, not conclusive, but they shed light across the key dimensions.”

Presumably, Chavez and Vaidya are hoping companies that use Privacy Grader will turning to Ketch’s paid products for help, but Vaidya said they’ll continue improving the free service and treat it as a “first class citizen product.”

Companies that have already used Privacy Grader include Patreon, The Home Depot and Chubbies. For example, Patreon’s deputy legal counsel Priya Sanger said that the service “helped us identify improved data governance in order to effectively execute our marketing and sales strategy.”

The super popular chat app Discord is getting a much-requested feature starting today: mobile screen sharing.

As the name suggests, mobile screen sharing lets users capture and broadcast everything on their phone’s display and stream it to a group of friends. The company tells me they’ve been particularly focused on making it work well when there’s a lot of onscreen motion, allowing for things like game streaming or remote YouTube/TikTok viewing parties with high frame rates and minimal latency.

Streaming your mobile device’s display means sharing everything that floats across your phone’s screen – so if you don’t want random texts potentially popping up midstream, you’ll want to turn on your phone’s Do Not Disturb mode.

Discord first picked up screen sharing abilities in 2017, rolling it out alongside video chat. Since then, sharing your screen has required a desktop or laptop; this update brings iOS and Android devices into the mix. Mobile screen share streams can be broadcast to up to 50 viewers simultaneously, with no cap on how many users can be screen sharing in the same channel.

The feature should start rolling out today, but don’t be surprised if you don’t see it immediately; it’s going out in waves, so some will get it sooner than others. If the rollout goes as planned, all users should have it by end of day Thursday.

Hightouch, a SaaS service that helps businesses sync their customer data across sales and marketing tools, is coming out of stealth and announcing a $2.1 million seed round. The round was led by Afore Capital and Slack Fund, with a number of angel investors also participating.

At its core, Hightouch, which participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch, aims to solve the customer data integration problems that many businesses today face.

During their time at Segment, Hightouch co-founders Tejas Manohar and Josh Curl witnessed the rise of data warehouses like Snowflake, Google’s BigQuery and Amazon Redshift — that’s where a lot of Segment data ends up, after all. As businesses adopt data warehouses, they now have a central repository for all of their customer data. Typically, though, this information is then only used for analytics purposes. Together with former Bessemer Ventures investor Kashish Gupta, the team decided to see how they could innovate on top of this trend and help businesses activate all of this information.

HighTouch co-founders Kashish Gupta, Josh Curl and Tejas Manohar.

“What we found is that, with all the customer data inside of the data warehouse, it doesn’t make sense for it to just be used for analytics purposes — it also makes sense for these operational purposes like serving different business teams with the data they need to run things like marketing campaigns — or in product personalization,” Manohar told me. “That’s the angle that we’ve taken with Hightouch. It stems from us seeing the explosive growth of the data warehouse space, both in terms of technology advancements as well as like accessibility and adoption. […] Our goal is to be seen as the company that makes the warehouse not just for analytics but for these operational use cases.”

It helps that all of the big data warehousing platforms have standardized on SQL as their query language — and because the warehousing services have already solved the problem of ingesting all of this data, Hightouch doesn’t have to worry about this part of the tech stack either. And as Curl added, Snowflake and its competitors never quite went beyond serving the analytics use case either.

Image Credits: Hightouch

As for the product itself, Hightouch lets users create SQL queries and then send that data to different destinations  — maybe a CRM system like Salesforce or a marketing platform like Marketo — after transforming it to the format that the destination platform expects.

Expert users can write their own SQL queries for this, but the team also built a graphical interface to help non-developers create their own queries. The core audience, though, is data teams — and they, too, will likely see value in the graphical user interface because it will speed up their workflows as well. “We want to empower the business user to access whatever models and aggregation the data user has done in the warehouse,” Gupta explained.

The company is agnostic to how and where its users want to operationalize their data, but the most common use cases right now focus on B2C companies, where marketing teams often use the data, as well as sales teams at B2B companies.

Image Credits: Hightouch

“It feels like there’s an emerging category here of tooling that’s being built on top of a data warehouse natively, rather than being a standard SaaS tool where it is its own data store and then you manage a secondary data store,” Curl said. “We have a class of things here that connect to a data warehouse and make use of that data for operational purposes. There’s no industry term for that yet, but we really believe that that’s the future of where data engineering is going. It’s about building off this centralized platform like Snowflake, BigQuery and things like that.”

“Warehouse-native,” Manohar suggested as a potential name here. We’ll see if it sticks.

Hightouch originally raised its round after its participation in the Y Combinator demo day but decided not to disclose it until it felt like it had found the right product/market fit. Current customers include the likes of Retool, Proof, Stream and Abacus, in addition to a number of significantly larger companies the team isn’t able to name publicly.

AWS today announced the preview of Amazon Location, a new service for developers who want to add location-based features to their web-based and mobile applications.

Based on mapping data from Esri and HERE Technologies, the service provides all of the basic mapping and point-of-interest data you would expect from a mapping service, including built-in tracking and geofencing features. It does not offer a routing feature, though.

“We want to make it easier and more cost-effective for you to add maps, location awareness, and other location-based features to your web and mobile applications,” AWS’s Jeff Barr writes in today’s announcement. “Until now, doing this has been somewhat complex and expensive, and also tied you to the business and programming models of a single provider.”

Image Credits: Amazon

At its core, Amazon Location provides the ability to create maps, based on the data and styles available from its partners (with more partners in the works) and access to their points of interest. Those are obviously the two core features for any mapping service. On top of this, Location also offers built-in support for trackers, so that apps can receive location updates from devices and plot them on a map. This feature can also be linked to Amazon Location’s geofencing tool so apps can send alerts when a device (or the dog that wears it) leaves a particular area.

It may not be as fully-featured as the Google Maps Platform, for example, but AWS promises that Location will be more affordable, with a variety of pricing plans (and a free three-month trial) that start at $0.04 for retrieving 1,000 map tiles. As with all things AWS, the pricing gets more complicated from there but seems quite reasonable overall.

While you can’t directly compare AWS’s tile-based pricing with Google’s plans, it’s worth noting that after you go beyond Google Map Platform’s $200 of free usage per month, static maps cost $2 per 1,000 requests.

After a number of pricing changes, Google’s mapping services lost a lot of goodwill from developers. AWS may be able to capitalize on this with this new platform, especially if it continues to build out its feature set to fill in some of the current gaps in the service.