Monthly Archives: October 2020

News: YouTube Premium subscribers get a new perk with launch of testing program

• October 7, 2020
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YouTube has long allowed its users to test new features and products before they go live to a wider audience. But in a recent change, YouTube’s latest series of experiments are being limited to those who subscribe the Premium tier of YouTube’s service. Currently, paid subscribers are the only ones able to test several new

YouTube has long allowed its users to test new features and products before they go live to a wider audience. But in a recent change, YouTube’s latest series of experiments are being limited to those who subscribe the Premium tier of YouTube’s service. Currently, paid subscribers are the only ones able to test several new product features, including one that allows iOS users to watch YouTube videos directly on the homescreen.

This is not the same thing as the Picture-in-Picture option that’s become available to app developers with iOS 14, to be clear. Instead, YouTube says this feature allows users who are scrolling on their YouTube homepage to watch videos with the sound on while they scroll through their feed.

Two other experiments are related to search. One lets you filter topics you search for by additional languages, including Spanish, French, or Portuguese. The other lets you use voice search to pull up videos when using the Chrome web browser.

Image Credits: YouTube, screenshot via TechCrunch

None of these tests will be very lengthy, however. Two of the three new experiments wrap up on Oct. 20, 2020 for example. The other wraps on Oct. 27. And they’ve only been live for a few weeks.

In years past, YouTube had allowed all users to try out new features in development from a dedicated site dubbed “TestTube.” In more recent years, however, it began to use the website YouTube.com/new to direct interested users to upcoming features before they rolled out publicly. For example, when YouTube introduced its redesign in 2017, users could visit that same website to opt-in to the preview ahead of its launch.

Now, the site is being used to promote other limited-time tests.

YouTube says the option to test the features was highlighted to Premium subscribers a few weeks ago within the YouTube app. It’s also the first time that YouTube has run an experimentation program tied to the Premium service, we’re told.

The company didn’t make a formal public announcement, but the addition was just spotted by several blogs, including XDA Developers and Android Central, for example.

Contrary to some reports, however, it does not appear that YouTube’s intention is to close off all its experiments to anyone except its paid subscribers. The company’s own help documentation, in fact, notes this limitation will only apply to “some” of its tests. 

YouTube also clarified to TechCrunch that the tests featured on the site represent only a “small minority” of those being run across YouTube. And they are not at all inclusive of the broader set of product experiments the company runs, according to the company.

In addition, non-Premium users can opt to sign up to be notified of additional opportunities to participate in other YouTube research studies, if they choose. This option appears at the bottom of the YouTube.com/new page. 

YouTube says the goal with the new experiments is two-fold. It allows product teams to feedback on different features and it allows Premium subscribers to act as early testers, if they want to.

Premium users who choose to participate can opt into and out of the new features individually, but can only try out one experiment at a time.

This could serve to draw more YouTube users to the Premium subscription, as there’s a certain amount of clout involved with being able to try out features and products ahead of the general public. Consider it another membership perk then — something extra on top of the baseline Premium tier features like ad-free videos, downloads, background play and more.

YouTube, which today sees over 2 billion monthly users, said earlier this year it’s converted at least 20 million users to a paid subscription service. (YouTube Premium / YouTube Music). As of Q3 2020, YouTube was the No. 3 largest app by consumer spend worldwide across iOS and Android, per App Annie data.

News: Decrypted: The major ransomware attack you probably didn’t hear about

• October 7, 2020
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Watching the news this past week was like drinking from a firehose. Speaking of which, you probably missed a busy week in cybersecurity, so here are the big stories from the past week. THE BIG PICTURE Blackbaud hack gets worse, as bank account data stolen Blackbaud, a cloud technology company used by colleges, universities, nonprofits

Watching the news this past week was like drinking from a firehose. Speaking of which, you probably missed a busy week in cybersecurity, so here are the big stories from the past week.

THE BIG PICTURE

Blackbaud hack gets worse, as bank account data stolen

Blackbaud, a cloud technology company used by colleges, universities, nonprofits (and far-right organizations), was hit by a data-stealing ransomware attack earlier this year. The attack was one of the biggest of the year in terms of the number of organizations affected, hitting dozens of universities, hospitals and other high-profile organizations like NPR. Blackbaud said in July that it paid the ransom — but also claimed and received “confirmation” that the stolen personal data “had been destroyed,” fooling absolutely nobody.

This week Blackbaud confirmed in a regulatory filing that the stolen data also included bank account data and Social Security numbers — far more personally identifiable information than the company first thought. “In most cases, fields intended for sensitive information were encrypted and not accessible,” the company claimed.

Despite Blackbaud’s claim that the data was deleted, these are malicious hackers driven by financial reward. Hope for the best, but assume the worst — Blackbaud’s data is still out there.

Facebook shuts down malware that hijacked accounts to run ads

Hackers spent about $4 million to run scammy ads on Facebook by hijacking the accounts of unsuspecting users, reports Wired. The hackers used malware, dubbed SilentFade, to compromise Facebook accounts using stolen passwords to use whatever saved credit card details on those accounts to buy ads for diet pills and fake designer handbags.

News: Transportation VCs suggest frayed US-China ties will impact mobility markets

• October 7, 2020
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On Tuesday, during TechCrunch’s annual Mobility event, we had the opportunity to interview three investors who spend much of their time focused narrowly on shifts in the transportation industry and we talked with the three — Amy Gu of Hemi Ventures, Reilly Brennan of Trucks VC, and Olaf Sakkers of Maniv Mobility — about a

On Tuesday, during TechCrunch’s annual Mobility event, we had the opportunity to interview three investors who spend much of their time focused narrowly on shifts in the transportation industry and we talked with the three — Amy Gu of Hemi Ventures, Reilly Brennan of Trucks VC, and Olaf Sakkers of Maniv Mobility — about a wide range of related issues to get their take. You can check out that interview below; in the meantime, we’re pulling out parts of the conversation that we found particularly interesting:

How the pandemic is affecting fundraising and the trends they’re watching

Olaf Sakkers: In dense cities, no one is taking transit, so you’re seeing a big shift toward micromobility, but in other cities, there’s been a big uptake in car use and secondhand and new-car demand despite of economic impacts. [You’re seeing this] trade-off between us getting out, and more goods and services that are coming to us than before, [including] food and other things. We’re also seeing a lot of geographic and culture variances, but those are things we’re seeing immediately.

Amy Gu: One thing that COVID has changed a lot is healthcare, which has become more important (during the pandemic) but also raised questions about how we make it more mobile. We’ve been looking at telemedicine companies and remote health care.

Is COVID-19 driving people to buy bikes, scooters and used cars instead of renting?

Reilly Brennan: People fell off micromobility platforms not because they didn’t like them, but they liked them so much, they wanted to buy [the scooters and bikes]. The ways a typical dealership makes money with financing, maintenance and service will come to micromobility. There isn’t much of a used market right now for e-bikes and e-scooters because there aren’t many of them, but that ecosystem will become stronger … [you can imagine] buying outright, leasing, subscriptions, wrapping in theft control … all the tricks you’ve seen carmakers bring to car financing, [meaning] not owning or renting but something in-between.

News: Adding Claire Díaz-Ortiz to its partnership, Magma Partners launches initiative to invest in female founders in LatAm

• October 7, 2020
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Claire Díaz-Ortiz has been many things over the course of her career — an angel investor, an early Twitter employee (who notably got the Pope on Twitter), the founder of a nonprofit, a published author and an entrepreneur. Now, the globe-trotting, multi-hyphenate polymath is adding “partner” to her list of titles as she joins the

Claire Díaz-Ortiz has been many things over the course of her career — an angel investor, an early Twitter employee (who notably got the Pope on Twitter), the founder of a nonprofit, a published author and an entrepreneur.

Now, the globe-trotting, multi-hyphenate polymath is adding “partner” to her list of titles as she joins the Latin American investment firm Magma Partners to head up its investment activities across South America’s southern cone and launch a new firm-wide initiative to invest in more women entrepreneurs.

With the appointment, Diaz-Ortiz joins a small but growing list of women investing in startups across the Latin American region, which is subject to the same woeful gender disparities as the rest of the venture world. As she’s noted, only 8% of VC investing partners are women in LatAm versus 13% in the USA. 

As part of her responsibilities, Diaz-Ortiz will help Magma operate the Brava Initiative, a commitment from Magma and a number of partner funds to invest in at least 20 female-founded Latin American companies over the next three years.

As Diaz-Ortiz has noted in TechCrunch, investing in female founders makes sense:

Many studies have established that female-founded companies outperform their all-male counterparts. Boston Consulting Group reports that for every dollar a female founder or co-founder raises, she generates 2.5X more revenue than a male founder.¹ First Round Capital’s research held that the female-founded companies it backed performed 63% better than all-male founding teams.² The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s showed that return on investment from women-led teams is 35% higher than their all-male counterparts.³ AllRaise, a nonprofit promoting women in VC, found that “companies with women on their founding teams are likely to exit at least one year faster compared to the rest of the market, and the number of exits for companies with at least one female founder is growing at a faster rate year-over-year than exits for companies with only male founders.”⁴ Jen Neundorfer, founding partner at Jane VC, succinctly explains her fund’s thesis of investing in female founders as, “investing in an overlooked asset class that is overperforming.” After all, it’s a “trillion-dollar opportunity.”⁵

“We’re doing this because female founded startups have better returns and to highlight the disparity in VC funding to women entrepreneurs,” Diaz-Ortiz wrote in a statement.

Claire Diaz-Ortiz. Image Credit: Jose Diaz-Ortiz

Magma has already made its first four investments into women-led or co-led startups: Jefa, a neobank focused on serving women in Central America; The Intern Group, which offers virtual internships for lifelong learning across careers; Prometeo, a startup developing open banking protocols for Latin American financial services; and Flickplay, a developer of augmented reality features for social networking.

Latin America already has several proof points to back up the assertion that money invested in female founders is money well spent. One need only look at the success of Nubank and its co-founder Cristina Junqueira to see that investing in women-led firms can make sense.

There’s still plenty of room to improve, but Latin America is already doing better than the rest of the world when it comes to backing diverse founding teams. In 2019, investments into mixed female-male founding teams represented 16% of dollars invested in Latin America, 9% in the USA and only 8% in Europe. 

“The venture capital industry in Latin America is quite young, not more than two decades. The first wave of firms was started by partners capable of raising funds from a male dominated pool of capital,” said Antonia Rojas of the new Brava Initiative from Magma, in a statement. “The next generation of VCs in the region will come from partners capable of accessing the best deals and adding the most value to founders. In this new era, where results matter more, women are playing a much bigger role. (Traditional LPs will soon realize this.)”

The Brava Initiative has also enlisted a group of mentors from around the world to provide guidance to the Latin American founders that it will back, including Maren Bannon, the founder of January Ventures.

News: Tech-publisher coalition backs new push for browser-level privacy controls

• October 7, 2020
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Remember ‘Do Not Track‘? The tracker-loving adtech industry hopes you don’t recall that decade+ doomed attempt to bake user-friendly privacy controls into browsers. But a coalition of privacy-forward tech companies, publishers and advocacy groups has taken the wraps off of a push to develop a new standard that gives Internet users a super simple way

Remember ‘Do Not Track‘? The tracker-loving adtech industry hopes you don’t recall that decade+ doomed attempt to bake user-friendly privacy controls into browsers. But a coalition of privacy-forward tech companies, publishers and advocacy groups has taken the wraps off of a push to develop a new standard that gives Internet users a super simple way to put digital guardrails around their data.

The effort to bake in a new browser-level privacy signal to stop the sale of personal data — which has been christened: Global Privacy Standard (GPC) — is being led by the ex-CTO of the FTC, Ashkan Soltani, and privacy researcher Sebastian Zimmeck.

They’ve got early backing from The New York Times; The Washington Post; Financial Times; WordPress-owner Automattic; dev community Glitch; privacy search engine DuckDuckGo; anti-tracking browser Brave; Firefox maker Mozilla; tracker blocker Disconnect; privacy tool maker Abine; Digital Content Next; Consumer Reports; and digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“In the initial experimental phase, individuals can download browsers and extensions from Abine, Brave, Disconnect, DuckDuckGo, and EFF in order to communicate their ‘do not sell or share’ preference to participating publishers,” they write in a press release unveiling the effort.

“Additionally, we are committed to developing GPC into an open standard that many other organizations will support and are in the process of identifying the best venue for this proposal,” they add.

This ‘DNT’-esque initiative is, at least initially, being tailored toward California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) — which gives Internet users in the state the right to opt out of having their data sold on (with the potential for further strengthening if a November ballot measure, called Prop24, gets passed).

The law also requires businesses to respect user opt-out preferences via a signal from their browser — reviving the potential for a low friction, browser-level control which was what supporters of DNT always hoped it would be.

The aim for the group steering GPC is to develop a standard for a browser-level opt-out for the sale of personal data that businesses subject to CCPA would be legally compelled to respond to — assuming they succeed in getting the standard accepted as legally binding under California’s law.

“We look forward to working with AG Becerra to make GPC legally binding under CCPA,” they write on that.

We’ve reached out to AG Becerra’s office for a response on the launch. He has also just tweeted approvingly — calling the proposal “a first step towards a meaningful global privacy control that will make it simple and easy for consumers to exercise their privacy rights online”.

“CA DOJ is encouraged to see the technology community developing a global privacy control in furtherance of the CCPA and consumer privacy rights,” he added in a follow on tweet.

At the same time — and as GPC’s name implies — the ambition is to develop a standard that’s able to flex to mesh with privacy regimes elsewhere, such as Europe’s GDPR framework (which provides citizens with a suite of protective and access rights around their data, though not a carbon-copy CCPA opt-out for the sale of data).

“While they don’t specifically call for a GPC, I think there’s a potential for EU DPAs [data protection agencies] to consider a mechanism like this as a valid way for consumers to invoke their rights under GDPR, including the objection to sale,” Soltani tells TechCrunch. “Also the spec was designed to be extensible in case the laws vary slightly from CCPA — permitting users to object to specific uses in GDPR — or even the new rights that will come about if CPRA (Prop24) passes next month.”

One big and obvious question looming over this effort is why not simply revive DNT as a vehicle for expressing the CCPA opt-out signal?

Much effort and resource has been expended over the years to try to make DNT fly. Not entirely without success, given it was able to gain widespread backing from browser makers — falling apart from lack of compliance on the other side of the coin given the lack of legal compulsion.

However now, with robust legal regimes in place protecting people’s digital data (at least in Europe and California), you could argue there’s an opportunity to revive DNT and make it stick this time. (And, indeed, some EU parliamentarians have, in recent years, suggested Do Not Track settings could be used to express consent to processing as part of a planned reform of EU ePrivacy rules — likely with an eye on tidying up the consent pop-up clutter that’s been supercharged by GDPR compliance efforts.)

However the answer to why GPC, rather than DNT 2.0, seems to be partly related to all the baggage accumulated around Do Not Track — whose pithy call to action can still send insta-shudders down adtech exec spines. (Whereas ‘Global Privacy Control’ is certainly boring-sounding enough that it could have been dreamt up by an adtech lobbyist and may, therefore, put fewer industry noses out of joint.)

More seriously, the potential for using DNT to express opt-out signals was discussed by California lawmakers when they were drawing up CCPA, and industry feedback taken in — and the message they got back was that most businesses were ignoring it, which in turn led to a feeling that a revived DNT would just continue to be ignored.

Hence the law may demand a more precision instrument to carry the torch for user privacy, is the thinking.

We also understand the GPC effort had intended and expected to be able to use DNT as the opt out mechanism. But in the end, given the concern around compliance, they decided a CCPA-specific mechanism was needed to circumvent this problem of businesses tuning out the broader DNT signal.

“Getting privacy online should be simple and accessible to everyone, period,” said Gabriel Weinberg, CEO & founder of DuckDuckGo in a supporting statement. “Global Privacy Control (GPC) takes us one step closer to making this vision a reality by creating a simple universal setting for users to express their preference for privacy. DuckDuckGo is proud to be a founding member of this effort and starting today, the GPC will be launching in our mobile browser and desktop browser extensions, making the setting available to over ten million consumers.”

“Mozilla is pleased to support the Global Privacy Control initiative. People’s data rights must be recognized and respected, and this is a step in the right direction. We look forward to working with the rest of the web standards community to bring these protections to everyone,” added Selena Deckelmann, VP of Firefox Desktop.

The full spec of the proposed GPC standard can be found here.

News: Dear Sophie: Is it easier and faster to get an O-1A than an EB-1A?

• October 7, 2020
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Here’s a summary of the pros and cons of O-1A and EB-1A visas.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

Is it easier and faster to get an O-1A extraordinary ability visa than an EB-1A extraordinary ability green card? What are the pros and cons of each?

—Outstanding in Oakland

Dear Outstanding:

Thanks so much for your timely questions about the extraordinary ability visa and green card. The short answer to your first question is yes, the O-1A visa is generally easier and faster to get than an EB-1A green card. In fact, I once helped a client get an O-1A approved in three days — of course, that was before the COVID-19 pandemic.

We recently launched “Extraordinary Ability Bootcamp,” a new, 15-module online course that takes a deep dive into the O-1A extraordinary ability nonimmigrant (temporary) visa, the EB-1A extraordinary ability green card, the EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver for exceptional ability) and what it takes to file a successful application in each category. Check my podcast where I discuss the Bootcamp in more detail. Register for the Extraordinary Ability Bootcamp and use code DEARSOPHIE for 20% off the enrollment fee.

In general, the requirements for a green card, which enable its holder to live permanently in the U.S., are more stringent than those for nonimmigrant visas, which only allow a temporary stay in the U.S. And U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) typically takes longer to process green card petitions than nonimmigrant visa petitions. Moreover, the U.S. imposes numerical and per-country caps on the number of green cards issued each year, which means some green card categories for people born in some countries, such as India and China, face long waits. Only a few visas have an annual cap (like the H-1B), but the O-1A visa is not one of them.

That said, the EB-1A has one of the shortest USCIS processing times, compared to other employment-based green cards. Also, EB-1A petitions are eligible for premium processing, which requires USCIS to make a decision on a petition within 15 days (whether it is “calendar” days or “business” days is currently in flux!). The I-140 petition can be adjudicated quickly in a few weeks, but for somebody whose priority date is “current” on the Visa Bulletin, the determining factor for how long a green card takes is often the I-485 processing time in the local field office. Recently that’s been taking about 1.5-2 years for interviews in the Bay Area.

Meanwhile, nonimmigration visa petitions can face delays for a number of reasons, but a delay happens most often when USCIS responds to a petition with a Request for Evidence (RFE). An RFE is a written notice from USCIS seeking additional evidence to make a decision on a case. During the past few years, the number of RFEs issued by USCIS for both visas and green cards has increased substantially.

Last month (September 2020) USCIS extended its policy of giving petitioners an extra 60 calendar days to respond to certain USCIS notices, including RFEs, intent to deny, revoke, rescind and terminate due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. For any of these notices dated between March 1, 2020, and January 1, 2021, a timely response will be considered 60 days after the date listed on the notice. Whether you want to take advantage of this extra time is a conversation to have with your attorney, based on the strength of your pending petition and the urgency of getting an approval.

As you probably know, the O-1A visa is for individuals who have achieved national or international acclaim and have risen to the top of their field in the areas of science, education, business or athletics. The EB-1A enables individuals who have achieved substantial international or national success in their field due to their extraordinary talent to live permanently in the U.S.

Here’s a summary of the pros and cons of the O-1A and the EB-1A:

Keep in mind that like the EB-1, the EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver) green card does not require an employer sponsor. However, the eligibility requirements for the EB-2 NIW are less stringent than for the EB-1A. For individuals born in India and China, the downside to the EB-2 NIW green card is that they face a much longer wait compared to the EB-1A. Unlike the EB-1A, premium processing is not available for EB-2 NIW petitions.

Remember, U.S. embassies and consulates are not processing green cards so you should try to apply for a green card while you remain in legal status in the U.S. Otherwise, you may have to return to and stay in your home country for a while.

Still, getting a visa or green card abroad remains possible. I recommend working with an experienced immigration attorney to discuss which options best match your accomplishments, goals and timing. Remember, you can sign up for Bootcamp and use code DEARSOPHIE for 20% off the enrollment fee to get qualified!

All my best,

Sophie

Have a question? Ask it here. We reserve the right to edit your submission for clarity and/or space. The information provided in “Dear Sophie” is general information and not legal advice. For more information on the limitations of “Dear Sophie,” please view our full disclaimer here. You can contact Sophie directly at Alcorn Immigration Law.

Sophie’s podcast, Immigration Law for Tech Startups, is available on all major podcast platforms. If you’d like to be a guest, she’s accepting applications!

News: Google Assistant gets an incognito-like guest mode

• October 7, 2020
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Google is launching a few new privacy features today that include a refreshed Safety Center that’s now live in the U.S. and coming soon globally, as well as more prominent alerts when the company expects that your account has been tampered with. The most interesting new feature, however, is a new Guest mode for the

Google is launching a few new privacy features today that include a refreshed Safety Center that’s now live in the U.S. and coming soon globally, as well as more prominent alerts when the company expects that your account has been tampered with.

The most interesting new feature, however, is a new Guest mode for the Google Assistant on Google-branded devices. Not to be confused with giving guests access to your Google Chromecast, for example, this new Guest mode is more akin to the incognito mode in your browser. With Guest mode on, which you invoke by saying “Hey Google, turn on guest mode,” the Assistant won’t offer personalized responses and your interactions won’t be saved to your account. It’ll stay on until you turn it off.

Typically, the Google Assistant saves all of your interactions to your account.  You can delete those manually or have Google automatically delete them after 3, 18 or 36 months. You can also prevent it from saving any audio recordings at all.

This new feature will roll out to smart speakers and displays in the coming weeks.

Talking about deleting your data, Google today also announced that you will soon be able to edit your Location History data in the Google Maps Timeline.

Also new: when you now search for “Is my Google Account secure” or use a similar query, Google will start displaying your security and privacy settings for you. That’s actually a useful step forward, given that we’ve reached a point where those settings are often hard to find.

News: Former Apple engineer and autocorrect creator builds his first app, a word game called Up Spell

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Former Apple software engineer and designer Ken Kocienda, whose work included the original iPhone and the development of touchscreen autocorrect, has created his first iOS app, Up Spell. The fast-paced, fun word game challenges users to spell all the words you can in two minutes and uses a lexicon of words Kocienda built to allow

Former Apple software engineer and designer Ken Kocienda, whose work included the original iPhone and the development of touchscreen autocorrect, has created his first iOS app, Up Spell. The fast-paced, fun word game challenges users to spell all the words you can in two minutes and uses a lexicon of words Kocienda built to allow for the inclusion of proper names. A portion of app revenues are also being donated to a local food bank, so you can help give back while relieving stress through gaming.

Kocienda says he had never before made a standalone iOS app.

When he worked at Apple, all the code he wrote was integrated into a bigger iOS release. So when Kocienda got the idea to develop a game, he looked to obvious sources of inspiration: his past experiences with typing, keyboards, and autocorrect.

The game’s lexicon was built first with the New General Service List to serve as its foundation. This was followed by weeks of writing small programs to generate lists of candidate words — like, by adding an “S” to existing words to pluralize them, for example. And hours more were spent scanning lists to choose the words to include.

Kocienda says he also wanted the game to fun, and personally found it frustrating that other word games wouldn’t allow proper names.

“Many games accept words like PHARAOH and PYRAMID, but not NILE or EGYPT. This doesn’t make sense to me. These are all words!,” he says.

So he built his own list that includes thousands of proper names, then added to it more slang and contractions to expand it even further. That means you can spell a word like S’MORES, which involves an apostrophe, for example.

Image Credits: Up Sell

While support for a variety of words, including proper names, is the key way the gameplay differentiates from rivals, the app’s business model is also one that’s becoming less common these days: it’s a one-time paid download.

The app is a $1.99 download that lets you pay once to play forever. Today, many games in this same space use a freemium model where the app download itself is free, but you’re then nagged with in-app hooks to buy coins or tokens to advance gameplay or unlock certain features.

Kocienda’s decision to forgo this model was intentional, he explains.

“I made Up Spell a two-minute game without much in the way of gameplay gimmicks,” says Kocienda. “You just spell words. 2020 has been a rough year for everyone, and sometimes taking out two minutes to think about nothing but spelling a few words is just the kind of right kind of stress reliever,” he adds. “I hope Up Spell brings people a little unexpected happiness to their 2020.”

Also of note, 25 cents per download is being donated to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, which works to get food to vulnerable people in Kocienda’s area.

If all goes well, Up Spell may be followed by other games with a similar model, like a sounds or color-matching games, for instance.

The new game is a one-time paid download on the App Store.

News: YC grad DigitalBrain snags $3.4M seed to streamline customer service tasks

• October 7, 2020
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Most startup founders have a tough road to their first round of funding, but the founders of Digital Brain had it a bit tougher than most. The two young founders survived by entering and winning hackathons to pay their rent and put on food on the table. One of the ideas they came up with

Most startup founders have a tough road to their first round of funding, but the founders of Digital Brain had it a bit tougher than most. The two young founders survived by entering and winning hackathons to pay their rent and put on food on the table. One of the ideas they came up with at those hackathons was DigitalBrain, a layer that sits on top of customer service software like Zendesk to streamline tasks and ease the job of customer service agents.

They ended up in Y Combinator in the Summer 2020 class, and today the company announced a $3.4 million seed investment. This total includes $3 million raised this round, which closed in August, and previously unannounced investments of $250,000 in March from Unshackled Ventures and $150,000 from Y Combinator in May.

The round was led by Moxxie Ventures with help from Caffeinated Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Shrug Capital, Weekend Fund, Underscore VC and Scribble Ventures along with a slew of individual investors.

Company co-founder Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran says that after he and his partner Dmitry Dolgopolov met at hackathon in May 2019, they moved into a community house in San Francisco full of startup founders. They kept hearing from their housemates about the issues their companies faced with customer service as they began scaling. Like any good entrepreneur, they decided to build something to solve that problem.

“DigitalBrain is an external layer that sits on top of existing help desk software to actually help the support agents get through their tickets twice as fast, and we’re doing that by automating a lot of internal workflows, and giving them all the context and information they need to respond to each ticket making the experience of responding to these tickets significantly faster,” Dinakaran told TechCrunch.

What this means in practice is that customer service reps work in DigitalBrain to process their tickets, and as they come upon a problem such as canceling an order or reporting a bug, instead of traversing several systems to fix it, they chose the appropriate action in DigitalBrain, enter the required information, and the problem is resolved for them automatically.  In the case of a bug, it would file a Jira ticket with engineering. In the case of canceling an order, it would take all of the actions and update all of the records required by this request.

As Dinakaran points out they aren’t typical Silicon Valley startup founders. They are 20 year old immigrants from India and Russia respectively, who came to the U.S. with coding skills and a dream of building a company. “We are both outsiders to Silicon Valley. We didn’t go to college. We don’t come from families of means. We wanted to come here and build our initial network from ground up,” he said.

Eventually they met some folks through their housemates, who suggested that they apply to Y Combinator. “As we started to meet people that we met through our community house here, some of them were YC founders and they kept saying I think you guys will love the YC community, not just in terms of your ethos, but also just purely from a perspective of meeting new people and where you are,” he said.

He said while he and his co-founder have trouble wrapping their arms around a number like the amount they have in the bank now, considering it wasn’t that long ago that they struggling to meet expenses every month, they recognize this money buys them an opportunity to help start building a more substantial company.

“What we’re trying to do is really accelerate the development and building of what we’re doing. And we think if we push the gas pedal with the resources we’ve gotten, we’ll be able to accelerate bringing on the next couple of customers, and start onboarding some of the larger companies we’re interested in,” he said.

News: Instagram’s Threads app now lets you message everyone, like its Direct app once did

• October 7, 2020
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Last year, Instagram announced it was ending support for its standalone mobile messaging app known as Direct, which had allowed users to quickly create and share messages with friends. Shortly thereafter, the company launched Threads, a new messaging app focused on status updates and communication with only those you identified in Instagram as your “Close

Last year, Instagram announced it was ending support for its standalone mobile messaging app known as Direct, which had allowed users to quickly create and share messages with friends. Shortly thereafter, the company launched Threads, a new messaging app focused on status updates and communication with only those you identified in Instagram as your “Close Friends.” Now, these two messaging concepts are merging. With the latest update to Threads, Instagram is again offring the full inbox experience, it says.

The changes were noted in the latest app update and were soon spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra and noted reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong — both who keep a close eye on changes to popular social apps.

In the latest update, Threads will now present a two-tabbed inbox.

In the “Close Friends” section, you can continue to message with your most frequent contacts, as before. The new second tab, “Everyone Else” allows access to your larger Instagram inbox. The app will continue to prioritize the “Close Friends” tab, and your status will continue to only be visible to Close Friends as well.

Instagram also tells us that, by default, Threads users will continue to only receive notifications for their Close Friends. But this can now be adjusted in the app’s Settings if you want to receive notifications for all messages instead.

What’s interesting is that these changes are rolling out so closely following a major update to Instagram’s messaging platform.

Only last week, Facebook introduced cross-app communication between Messenger and Instagram, alongside other features.

That update allows Instagram users to opt to upgrade to a new messaging experience that includes the ability to change chat colors, react with any emoji, watch videos together, set messages to disappear and more. These “fun” features serve as a way to entice users to agree to the update, which then locks users further inside the Facebook universe as it opens up cross-platform messaging. That means upgraded users can use Instagram to message their Facebook friends.

With the changes to Threads, one has to wonder if Facebook is now envisioning the standalone chat app as another potential entry point into its larger messaging platform.

Instagram says that’s not the case today.

“Cross-app communication is an opt-in update for people using Instagram, and will not be enabled for Threads,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

That doesn’t mean Threads won’t be updated to later offer some of the other changes that Instagram users can now take advantage of, if they choose to upgrade their messaging experience.

In fact, we understand that Instagram is considering bringing some of those new features over to Threads in the future. There’s no exact timeframe for this project at this point, though.

Presumably, this would mean connecting the Threads app on the backend to the newly built messaging infrastructure. If that’s true, even if Facebook chose to keep cross-app communication an Instagram-only (and Messenger-only) experience, it would still be tying in another core app, Threads, to the new messaging platform. And this, in turn, could make it harder to unspool the apps in the case that Facebook is forced to break up its business, if regulators were declare it a monopoly.

It’s not clear, however, if Threads has yet been connected to that infrastructure or if it will further down the road. But it’s worth keeping an eye on.

The Threads update is live now.