Monthly Archives: October 2020

News: Envisics nabs $50M for its in-car holographic display tech at a $250M+ valuation

• October 7, 2020
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The jury is still out on what might become the most viable business models for augmented reality technology, but in the meantime a startup out of the UK is betting one big area will be in vehicles, in the form of holographic displays. And today it is announcing a significant round of funding from strategic

The jury is still out on what might become the most viable business models for augmented reality technology, but in the meantime a startup out of the UK is betting one big area will be in vehicles, in the form of holographic displays. And today it is announcing a significant round of funding from strategic investors to fill out its vision (so to speak).

Envisics, which brings together technologies like computer vision, machine learning, big data analytics and navigation to build hardware that integrates into vehicles to project holographic, head-up displays providing enhanced “dashboards” of information to drivers — with features like mapping, navigation guidance and hazard warnings — is today announcing that it has raised $50 million in a Series B round of funding.

Dr. Jamieson Christmas, the founder of the company, said in an interview that the funding is being made at a valuation of over $250 million, “significantly up” on its previous round, although Envisics, based in the town of Milton Keynes in England, has never disclosed its valuation before.

The capital is coming from a strong group of strategic investors that points to the companies that are already working with the startup. Hyundai Mobis, General Motors Ventures, SAIC Motors and Van Tuyl Companies (the family office of the Van Tuyl Group, which made a fortune in automotive dealerships and related services) all participated in the round.

Envisics is already working with car companies to integrate its technology into vehicles. Initially, it’s focusing on the higher end of the market and integrating its tech into models from Jaguar Land Rover (owned by Tata Motors), Christmas said. Mass production of vehicles using its technology is slated for 2023.

At a time when AR startups have been on somewhat shaky ground, the funding is a validation not just for Envisics, but for the wider market in which it operates.

Christmas first got into holographic displays through his first startup, Two Trees, which eventually got acquired in 2016 by Daqri, and AR glasses company that was looking for more tech to better compete with Microsoft and its HoloLens.

Christmas said that while Daqri was focused on headsets, he still saw an opportunity to work on holographic tech for automakers (indeed, when it was acquired, Two Trees already had automotive customers).

That eventually led to Christmas, two years later in 2018, spinning out Envisics (once again as a UK startup, like his previous one) to focus just on the holographic automotive opportunity.

It turned out to be a very timely move: Daqri eventually shut down in September 2019 after failing to find its footing as a business and running out of money in what was already a challenging climate for AR. It was not the only one: other casualties at that time included patent and asset sales from the Osterhout Design Group and Meta.

If Envisics managed to jump off the burning platform that was AR headset displays, it arguably went from the frying pan into the fire (excuse the mixing of a few heated metaphors): billions of dollars have been invested into the automotive sector and its hot pursuit of what it hopes will be the next generation of transportation, autonomous vehicles.

Yet if you think AR has yet to find a landing place as a business, self-driving cars are even further from their destination. Experts agree that we are many years away still from fully-autonomous vehicles capable of making decisions as reliably as humans, and some skeptics wonder if we’ll ever get there at all.

Enter technology like Envisics’. The company’s tools are not a replacement for human drivers, but they definitely enhance how a human can drive, and in the many steps that we’ll see between today and some future where cars can actually drive themselves, tech like Envisics’ will continue to play a vital and interesting role, one that you can imagine has lots of room to evolve along with the cars themselves. (For example, today it provides vital data; tomorrow it could also provide… useful diversions if you no longer have to do any driving?)

“Hyundai Mobis will jointly develop autonomous driving specialized AR HUDs with Envisics, targeting mass production by 2025,” Executive Vice President, CTO, Sung Hwan Cho said in a statement. “We will proactively present the next generation AR HUD to global automakers with increased safety and convenience to avoid distracting the driver.”

“GM is very impressed with Envisics’ holographic augmented reality-enhanced head-up display technology,” added Matt Tsien, president of GM Ventures. “This technology will help us revolutionize the in-vehicle experience with a variety of safe, highly integrated and intuitive applications, including applications that will enhance the hands-free driving experience in future EVs, like the Cadillac LYRIQ.”

“We are very excited to be part of Envisics journey to commercialize its revolutionary holographic technology and look forward to partnering with them to deploy advanced AR-HUDs in our next generation of cars for both the Chinese domestic and global markets,” said Michael Cohen, Investment Director at SAIC Capital, in his own statement.

News: Bespoken Spirits raises $2.6M in seed funding to combine machine learning and accelerated whiskey aging

• October 7, 2020
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Bespoken Spirits, a Silicon Valley spirits company that has developed a new data-driven process to accelerate the aging of whiskey and create specific flavors, today announced that it has raised a $2.6 million seed funding round. Investors include Clos de la Tech owner T.J. Rodgers and baseball’s Derek Jeter. The company was co-founded by former

Bespoken Spirits, a Silicon Valley spirits company that has developed a new data-driven process to accelerate the aging of whiskey and create specific flavors, today announced that it has raised a $2.6 million seed funding round. Investors include Clos de la Tech owner T.J. Rodgers and baseball’s Derek Jeter.

The company was co-founded by former Bloom Energy, Blue Jeans and Mixpanel exec Stu Aaron and another Bloom Energy alumn, Martin Janousek, whose name can be found on a fair number of Bloom Energy patents.

Bespoken isn’t the first startup to venture in accelerated aging, a process that tries to minimize the time it takes to age these spirits, which is typically done in wooden barrels. The company argues that it’s the first to combine that with a machine learning-based approach though what it calls its ACTivation technology.

“Rather than putting the spirit in a barrel and passively waiting for nature to take its course, and just rolling the dice and seeing what happens, we instead use our proprietary ACTivation technology — with the A, C and T standing for aroma, color and taste — to instill the barrel into the spirit, and actively control the process and the chemical reactions in order to deliver premium quality tailored spirits — and to be able to do that in just days rather than decades.”

And while there is surely a lot of skepticism around this technology, especially in a business that typically prides itself on its artisanal approach, the company has won prizes at a number of competitions. The team argues that traditional barrel aging is a wasteful process, where you lose 20 percent of the product through evaporation, and one that is hard to replicate. And because of how long it takes, it also creates financial challenges for upstarts in this business — and it makes it hard to innovate

As the co-founders told me, there are three pillars to its business: selling its own brand of spirits, maturation-as-a-service for rectifiers and distillers and producing custom private label spirits for retailers, bars and restaurants. At first, the team mostly focused on the latter two — and especially its maturation-as-a-service business. Right now, Aaron noted, a lot of craft distilleries are facing financial strains and need to unlock their inventory and get their product to market sooner — and maybe at a better quality and hence higher price point — than they previously could.

There’s also the existing market of rectifiers, who, at least in the U.S., take existing products and blend them. These, too, are looking for ways to improve their processes and make it more replicable.

Interestingly, a lot of breweries, too, are now sitting on excess or expired beer because of the pandemic. “They’re realizing that rather than paying somebody to dispose of that beer and taking it back, they can actually recycle — or upcycle maybe is a better word — the beer, by distilling it into whiskey,” Aaron said. “But unfortunately, when a brewery distills beer into whiskey, it’s typically not very good whiskey. And that’s where we come in. We can take that beer bin, as a lot of people call initial distillation, and we can convert it into a premium quality whiskey.”

Bespoken is also working with a few grocery chains, for example, to create bespoke whiskeys for their house brands that match the look and flavor of existing brands or that offer completely new experiences.

The way the team does this is by collecting a lot of data throughout its process and then having a tasting panel describe the product for them. Using that data and feeding it into its systems, the company can then replicate the results — or tweak them as necessary — without having to wait for years for a barrel to mature.

“We’re collecting all this data — and some of the data that we’re collecting today, we don’t even know yet what we’re going to use it for,” Janousek said. Using its proprietary techniques, Bespoken will often create dozens of samples for a new customer and then help them whittle those down.

“I often like to describe our company as a cross between 23andme, Nespresso and Impossible Foods,” Aaron said. “We’re like 23andme, because again, we’re trying to map the customer to preference to the recipe to results. There is this big data, genome mapping kind of a thing. And we’re like Nespresso because our machine takes spirit and supply pods and produces results, although obviously we’re industrial scale and they’re not. And it’s like Impossible Foods, because it’s totally redefining an age-old antiquated model to be completely different.”

The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its market momentum and build out its technology. Its house brand is currently available for sale in California, Wisconsin and New York.

“The company’s ability to deliver both quality and variety is what really caught my attention and made me want to invest,” said T.J. Rogers. “In a short period of time, they’ve already produced an incredible range of top-notch spirits from whiskeys to rum, brandy and tequila–all independently validated time and again in blind tastings and prestigious competitions.”

Full disclaimer: the company sent me a few samples. I’m not enough of a whiskey aficionado to review those, but I did enjoy them (responsibly).

News: Slack introduces new features to ease messaging between business partners

• October 7, 2020
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Slack is holding its Frontiers conference this week — virtually like everyone else in 2020 — and it’s introducing some new features to make it easier to message between partners. At the same time, it’s talking about some experimental features that could appear in the platform at some point (or not). Let’s start with some

Slack is holding its Frontiers conference this week — virtually like everyone else in 2020 — and it’s introducing some new features to make it easier to message between partners. At the same time, it’s talking about some experimental features that could appear in the platform at some point (or not).

Let’s start with some features to help communicate with partners outside of your company in a secure way. This is always a tough nut to crack whether it’s collaboration or file sharing or any of the things that trusted partners do when they are working closely together.

To help solve that, the company is creating the notion of trusted partners, and this has a few components. The first is Slack Connect DMs (direct messages), which allows users inside an organization to collaborate with anyone outside their company simply by sending an invite.

“You can now direct message anyone in the Slack ecosystem. That means that anyone that has a Slack license can connect to one another,” Ilan Frank, VP of product at Slack told TechCrunch. While the company is introducing the new capability this week, it won’t be widely available until next year as the company wants to make sure this is used for business purposes only in a secure and non-spammy way.

“We’re going to be focused on, before we make this widely available, a lot of different information privacy and security [components] to make sure that we account for things like spam and phishing attacks and all that. This should not be a LinkedIn or Facebook Messenger where anyone can connect with you. This is [going to focus on] business for business work,” Frank explained.

Slack is introducing a couple of concepts to help ensure that happens. For starters, it’s adding Verified Organizations, which works a bit like verified users on Twitter, to help ensure you are dealing with someone from an organization you trust and work with before you start exchanging information on Slack.

“So if someone connects to you through direct message or through a channel, before you even make that connection, [you can ensure] if they are [from] a verified Slack organization versus someone who has just signed up on the internet, and you have not heard them, don’t have a relationship with them and don’t know who they are,” Frank said.

The last piece is called Managed Connections, which lets Slack admins control which organizations and individuals can connect with people inside your organization on Slack in a streamlined manner, which helps ensure that the other two new features are used in a responsible way.

“Organizations have told us that they want to go even deeper into the granularity of control, and they want to have different policies by external organizations that they’re connected to,” he said. Managed Connections lets admins set policies around different types of relationships with outside organizations.

All of these new tools are being introduced this week, but will be released later this year or early next year.

Among the other things the company working on in is enabling customers to embed video or audio in a Slack channel, extending it beyond a pure text messaging tool. The company was careful to point out that these features are just experiments for now and may or may not end up in the product  in the future.

News: Kong launches Kong Konnect, its cloud-native connectivity platform

• October 7, 2020
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At its (virtual) Kong Summit 2020, API platform Kong today announced the launch of Kong Konnect, its managed end-to-end cloud-native connectivity platform. The idea here is to give businesses a single service that allows them to manage the connectivity between their APIs and microservices and help developers and operators manage their workflows across Kong’s API

At its (virtual) Kong Summit 2020, API platform Kong today announced the launch of Kong Konnect, its managed end-to-end cloud-native connectivity platform. The idea here is to give businesses a single service that allows them to manage the connectivity between their APIs and microservices and help developers and operators manage their workflows across Kong’s API Gateway, Kubernetes Ingress and King Service Mesh runtimes.

“It’s a universal control plane delivery cloud that’s consumption-based, where you can manage and orchestrate API gateway runtime, service mesh runtime, and Kubernetes Ingress controller runtime — and even Insomnia for design — all from one platform,” Kong CEO and co-founder Augusto ‘Aghi’ Marietti told me.

The new service is now in private beta and will become generally available in early 2021.

At the core of the platform is Kong’s new so-called ServiceHub, which provides that single pane of glass for managing a company’s services across the organization (and make them accessible across teams, too).

As Marietti noted, organizations can choose which runtime they want to use and purchase only those capabilities of the service that they currently need. The platform also includes built-in monitoring tools and supports any cloud, Kubernetes provider or on-premises environment, as long as they are Kubernetes-based.

The idea here, too, is to make all these tools accessible to developers and not just architects and operators. “I think that’s a key advantage, too,” Marietti said. “We are lowering the barrier by making a connectivity technology easier to be used by the 50 million developers — not just by the architects that were doing big grand plans at a large company.”

To do this, Konnect will be available as a self-service platform, reducing the friction of adopting the service.

This is also part of the company’s grander plan to go beyond its core API management services. Those services aren’t going away, but they are now part of the larger Kong platform. With its open-source Kong API Gateway, the company built the pathway to get to this point, but that’s a stable product now and it’s now clearly expanding beyond that with this cloud connectivity play that takes the company’s existing runtimes and combines them to provide a more comprehensive service.

“We have upgraded the vision of really becoming an end-to-end cloud connectivity company,” Marietti said. “Whether that’s API management or Kubernetes Ingress, […] or Kuma Service Mesh. It’s about connectivity problems. And so the company uplifted that solution to the enterprise.”

 

News: Okta adds new no-code workflows that use identity to trigger sales and marketing tasks

• October 7, 2020
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It seems that no-code is the tech watchword of the year. It refers to the ability to create something that normally would require a developer to code, and replace it with dragging and dropping components instead, putting the task in reach of much less technical business users. Today Okta announced new no-code workflows that provide

It seems that no-code is the tech watchword of the year. It refers to the ability to create something that normally would require a developer to code, and replace it with dragging and dropping components instead, putting the task in reach of much less technical business users. Today Okta announced new no-code workflows that provide a way to use identity as a trigger to launch a customer-centric workflow.

Okta co-founder and CEO Todd McKinnon says that the company has created a series of connectors to make it easier to connect identity to a workflow that includes sales and marketing tooling. This comes on the heels of the identity lifecycle workflows, the company introduced at the Oktane customer conference in April.

“For this release we are introducing customer identity workflows which are focused on the connectors for all the customer-specific systems, things like Salesforce and Marketo and all the customer-centric [applications] that you’d want to do with your customer identities. And you can imagine over time that we’re going to expose this to more and more areas that will cover every kind of scenario a company would want to use,” McKinnon told TechCrunch.

McKinnon says that last year the company introduced Platform Services, which pulled apart the various pieces of the platform and exposed them as individual services, which bigger company customers could tap into as needed. He says that this is an extension of that idea, but instead of having to get engineering talent to write complex code to tie the Okta service into say Salesforce, you can simply drag the Salesforce connector to your workflow.

As McKinnon describes this using early adopter MLB as an example, say someone downloads the MLB app, creates a log-in and signs in. At that point, if MLB marketing personnel wanted to connect to any applications outside of Okta, it would normally require leveraging some programming help to make it happen.

But with the new workflow tools, a marketing person can set up a workflow that checks the log-in for fraud, then sends the person’s information automatically into Salesforce to create a customer record, and also triggers a welcome email in Marketo — and all of this could be done automatically triggered by the customer sign up.

This functionality was made possible by the $52.5 million acquisition of Azuqua last year. As COO and co-founder Frederic Kerrest wrote in a blog post at the time of the acquisition (and we quoted in the article):

“With Okta and Azuqua, IT teams will be able to use pre-built connectors and logic to create streamlined identity processes and increase operational speed. And, product teams will be able to embed this technology in their own applications alongside Okta’s core authentication and user management technology to build…integrated customer experiences.”

And that’s precisely the kind of approach the company is delivering this week. For now, it’s available as an early adopter program, but as Okta works out the kinks, you can expect them to build on this and add other enterprise workflow connectors to the mix as it expands this vision, giving the company a way to move beyond pure identity management and connect to other parts of the organization.

News: Shogun raises $35M to help brands take on Amazon with faster and better sites of their own

• October 7, 2020
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E-commerce has boomed this year, with more businesses and shoppers than ever before turning to websites and apps as a safer, socially distanced alternative during the current global health pandemic. Today, a startup that has built a platform to help individual companies and brands design better websites is announcing a round of growth funding to

E-commerce has boomed this year, with more businesses and shoppers than ever before turning to websites and apps as a safer, socially distanced alternative during the current global health pandemic. Today, a startup that has built a platform to help individual companies and brands design better websites is announcing a round of growth funding to help them step up to that challenge with faster and better designed interfaces.

Shogun, which lets companies build sites that sit on top of e-commerce back-ends like Shopify, Big Commerce or Magento to let them sell goods and services, is today announcing that it has raised $35 million in funding after seeing its business growth 182% over the last year, with 15,000 companies — including Leesa, MVMT, Timbuk2, Chubbies and K Swiss, as well as household Fortune 500 brands that it declines to name — now using Shogun’s tools, up 5,000 in the last eight months.

Finbarr Taylor, the CEO who co-founded the company with Nick Raushenbush, said that the startup plans to use the company to continue enhancing its two main products — Page Builder for bigger companies and agencies; and frontend, a headless commerce solution for smaller businesses that offers faster page-load times — and to help improve its market strategy.

To date, much of the company’s growth has been organic, with a marketing team of two, and also only two sales people. “So it will be about scaling up those teams as well as our engineer and design and product teams, to deliver on the promises we made to our customers,” Taylor said.

The Series B is being led by Accel with participation from Initialized Capital, VMG Partners, and Y Combinator. The round also has a number of high-profile individuals in it, which speak to Shogun’s credibility in the worlds of e-commerce and web design. The list includes Bryant Chou (CTO at Webflow), Mark Lavelle and Mark Lenhard (former CEO and SVP of Strategy at Magento, respectively), Alex O’Byrne (CEO of We Make Websites, a leading Shopify agency), Brian Grady (CEO of Gorilla Group, a leading Magento agency), and Romain Lapeyre (CEO of Gorgias).

Growth is one marker of how hot the market is for what Shogun is doing. In addition to Shogun’s own expanding list of users, it’s estimated by the company (citing figures from Adobe) that there has been some $94 billion in extra sales online (beyond original projections, that is) since March globally.

Another marker is the funding itself. This the second round that the startup has raised in the short span of eight months: Shogun closed a $10 million Series A in February of this year led by Initialized (with participation also from YC and VMG).

And a third marker is the valuation. Taylor said that the company is valued in the “solid nine figures” but declined to say where in the regions of hundreds of millions of dollars that might be. For some context, the company was valued at $50 million in February, according to data from PitchBook.

Shogun’s news comes at a key moment in the world of e-commerce not just in terms of the wider macroeconomic trends, but in terms of who is making the wheels move.

Amazon and other marketplaces have come to dominate how a lot of people are shopping online: after all, they offer one-stop shops for whatever you might want or need, free shipping, and a familiar interface. Similarly, social media platforms have made a play as a new kind of “store” of sorts, a place where brands already are interacting with would-be customers, and are now being given the tools to sell to them there as well.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story: brands and companies want to have their own space to present things how they want them to look, to better control the customer experience, and to make sure that they are not beholden to a third party (both physically and financially) for their online survival.

Yes, some consumers might only care about where they can get what they want for the cheapest price, but others know exactly what they want, or feel loyal to a specific company, and want to shop there without the rest of the noise, and there will always be a business opportunity in building stores for them, too.

And the predictability of the interface of a marketplace like Amazon, or a “shoppable” photo on Instagram, belies how frustratingly oblique it can also be at times. I don’t want to see 15 different Danish whisks at slightly different prices; I just want one that will arrive in one piece and not break after a month of use, leading me down a rabbit hole trying to find someone to provide a refund. Similarly, I may want to buy from a brand, but perhaps not the particular item that they’re serving me in a Story or a Pin.

Shogun’s proposition to the companies it works with is to give them more choice and better speed after they have already made the decision to build their own “real estate” online using backends like Shopify’s.

The opportunity is that, even if an e-commerce business is seen as a “tech” play, that is not often its core competency.

“Merchants large and small are getting sick of maintaining their own tech stacks,” said Ethan Choi, a partner at Accel. While the platforms are getting ever more sophisticated by moving into areas like shipping and logistics alongside payments and inventory ordering and so on, they have yet to extend into web design.

“Shopify only has like 15 templates,” he said. “There is no design control and you look like 1 of one million other sites.” At the same time, if you have the funds and energy to build a custom site, he added, “that is expensive and it can take a whole day to change just a piece of text.”

The speed is an issue that Shogun has identified and fixed in another way: Taylor says that with site speed being the most important aspect of converting a browser to a buyer, it’s providing the fastest page loading times to customers.

As with so many startup stories, Taylor and Raushenbush stumbled on their gap in the market by accident.

The pair were working at Y Combinator — Taylor, an engineer originally from Glasgow in Scotland, had been devising tools for YC to help it manage the huge inbound volume of applications it was receiving for its incubator. (Sidenote: one offshoot of that was the Startup School that the company created to better address working with startups on a more regional level: Taylor built that.)

As a side project, he and Nick had come up with a page builder based on Ruby on Rails. It wasn’t getting much traction, but a friend of Nick’s, who worked for an e-commerce agency, said that if the two could tweak it for building e-commerce pages specifically, his agency would use it and even pay them.

“So we did,” he said.

That eventually took off with more customers and more use, prompting them to eventually move to the other side of the organization, becoming part of a YC cohort and eventually striking out on their own.

Looking ahead, one particular focus for Shogun, Taylor said, will be to build more tools to improve mobile commerce. Typically, mobile accounts for 80% of all e-commerce browsing but only some 20% of sales, he noted.

News: Big tech blows a collective raspberry at the House’s antitrust report

• October 7, 2020
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Big tech has responded to the mammoth antitrust report put out by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee yesterday with blanket denials there’s any monopolistic behaviour or competitive imbalances to see here. Below is a quick run down of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google’s rebuttals. Among the committee’s (many) recommendations are structural separations and prohibitions on

Big tech has responded to the mammoth antitrust report put out by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee yesterday with blanket denials there’s any monopolistic behaviour or competitive imbalances to see here.

Below is a quick run down of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google’s rebuttals.

Among the committee’s (many) recommendations are structural separations and prohibitions on certain dominant platforms from operating in adjacent lines of business; interoperability and data portability requirements; non-discrimination requirements and a ban on self-preferencing; and beefed up merger and monopolization enforcement, as well as better administration of antitrust laws.

Amazon

In a lengthy but punchy blog post the ecommerce giant brands the committee’s views on antitrust “fringe notions” and “regulatory spitballing” — lathering on dire predictions of doom for small business and hoards of inflated-price-enraged consumers should lawmakers deign to dabble in any “misguided interventions”.

Sample quote:

The flawed thinking would have the primary effect of forcing millions of independent retailers out of online stores, thereby depriving these small businesses of one of the fastest and most profitable ways available to reach customers. For consumers, the result would be less choice and higher prices. Far from enhancing competition, these uninformed notions would instead reduce it.

The substance of Amazon’s argument against the need for antitrust intervention is the top-line claim that retail is “thriving and extraordinarily competitive” — with the tech giant saying it accounts for a tiny fraction of global retail and isn’t even the largest US retailer by revenues (that’s Walmart). Among the grab-bag of competitors Amazon lists as evidence that it’s a mere retail minnow are Best Buy, Costco, Facebook, Kroger, Google Shopping, Home Depot, Shopify and Target. (It doesn’t mention Whole Foods because it already consumed that competitor.)

The strategy here is to claim online and offline retail are just one giant market — because of course if lawmakers slice by online retail alone there’s no denying Amazon’s oversized punch.

Another chunk of rebuttal is against what it claims is “false narrative” that its own interests don’t align with “the thousands of small and medium-sized businesses thriving as sellers in our store”.

“The opposite is true: Amazon and sellers complement each other, and together we create a better customer experience than either could create alone,” it pouts, before going on to say SME sales account for around 60% of all physical products sold on its marketplace, and that it “typically” makes the same or more revenue on third-party sales — rubbishing the idea there could possibly be any conflict of interest at all from Amazon also selling own brand rival products on the same marketplace where only Amazon gets an overview of merchants’ data.

NB: European regulators aren’t so convinced about the lack of competitive risks on dual-sided platforms.  

Apple

Asked for its response to the committee report, Apple sent us an on the record statement in which it writes that it “vehemently” disagrees with the conclusions reached — adding the beautiful kicker to the sentence “with respect to Apple”. Epic trolling Tim.

It also said it would be issuing a more “extensive refutation” of the accusations levelled at its business in the coming days.

Here’s the rest of its statement:

Our company does not have a dominant market share in any category where we do business. From its beginnings 12 years ago with just 500 apps, we’ve built the App Store to be a safe and trusted place for users to discover and download apps and a supportive way for developers to create and sell apps globally. Hosting close to two million apps today, the App Store has delivered on that promise and met the highest standards for privacy, security and quality. The App Store has enabled new markets, new services and new products that were unimaginable a dozen years ago, and developers have been primary beneficiaries of this ecosystem. Last year in the United States alone, the App Store facilitated $138 billion in commerce with over 85% of that amount accruing solely to third-party developers. Apple’s commission rates are firmly in the mainstream of those charged by other app stores and gaming marketplaces. Competition drives innovation, and innovation has always defined us at Apple. We work tirelessly to deliver the best products to our customers, with safety and privacy at their core, and we will continue to do so.

In further background comments the gist of Apple’s argument boils down to ‘Don’t mess with a good thing’.

Aka billions of users across 175 countries can’t be wrong nor unhappy — nor can the tens of millions of developers making wares for its kit, given, for example, how many (1.8M) apps are now on the App Store. (Developers whose apps get excluded are unlikely to be so happy, of course.)

It also defends the 30% commission it takes on app sales — aka the ‘Apple tax’ — pointing to a recent study by Analysis Group that the structure is “similar in magnitude to those of other app stores and digital content marketplaces” — and further noting that for in-app subscriptions the tax falls to 15% after the first year.

Lastly it invokes privacy, pointing out that by reviewing apps and curating its users access to third party software it can offer protection from surveillance, as well as keep things clean by rejecting objectionable, harmful, unsafe, and illegal content. (Albeit, even the Apple gods can’t always do that.)

Facebook

In a brief on the record statement — presumably while it prepares the next chapters of its neverending ‘hard questions‘ series of lobbyist ‘literature’ — the social media giant sought to paint its business success as American as apple pie or, er, the freely unfettered market.

Here’s what it told us in full, with remarks attributed to a faceless “Facebook spokesperson”:

Facebook is an American success story. We compete with a wide variety of services with millions, even billions, of people using them. Acquisitions are part of every industry, and just one way we innovate new technologies to deliver more value to people. Instagram and WhatsApp have reached new heights of success because Facebook has invested billions in those businesses. A strongly competitive landscape existed at the time of both acquisitions and exists today. Regulators thoroughly reviewed each deal and rightly did not see any reason to stop them at the time.

So, in sum, there’s absolutely nothing to see here but successful! business! as! usual! is Facebook’s wafer-thin claim. Sure, it bought and assimilated rival social media businesses that could have gained enough market share to challenge its dominance of the category but that’s also just totally great business! Moreover, Facebook buying those really successful rivals just made them even more great and successful! But not so great and successful that there isn’t also “strong” competition in the space Facebook has dominated for 15+ years through its sheer force of business success.

Of course Facebook’s statement makes no mention of Onavo: A VPN app it acquired and used to spy on rival app usage to figure out which apps it should be buying or, er, crushing via cloning their innovations — but that’s a whole other story Facebook isn’t at all keen to talk about for some reason. Ditto the whole paying teenagers to spy on them thing.

In any case, the social media behemoth concludes, it’s the regulators who really screwed up here because they didn’t stop it buying Instagram and WhatsApp when they could have done. So ya! boo! sucks! it’s too late suckers! (we paraphrase).

Google

We also reached out to Google for a response to the antitrust report. The adtech giant had a statement ready to go — which kicks off by emphasising how much value its “free” products pump into the economy (not to mention all the “billions” it throws at R&D), before going on to chide policymakers for making “outdated and inaccurate allegations”.

The statement also features what’s become a go-to tech giant talking point as antitrust has risen up the political agenda in recent years — which is the claim that breaking up Internet giants wouldn’t actually fix anything.

Rather, Google warns (taking a similar tack to Amazon), of economic ruin awaiting the US economy — even from a ‘lesser’ intervention of tinkering with the sacred protections enshrined in Section 230 — and geopolitical doom for America’s tech leadership (taking a similar tack to Facebook). Or, in other words, cut Google and American bleeds. But also, no we’re not a monopoly, hell no! We’re just a verrrry fleet-o-foot operator in a “highly competitive industry”. So, er, which is it?

Interestingly, Google is the only tech giant to include some soft soap for lawmakers in this first response to the antitrust committee report — writing that it “support[s] Congress focusing on areas where clearer laws would help consumers”. (Translation: Stick with the small stuff and leave the important moneymaking business stuff to big tech.)

Here it invokes interoperability (because what technology solutionist doesn’t love a technology ‘solution’ to a monopoly problem); as well as claimed support for passing “comprehensive federal privacy legislation”. (Because a weaker federal framework is the only way to unpick state-level privacy laws with teeth like CCPA).

Here’s Google’s statement in full:

Google’s free products like Search, Maps and Gmail help millions of Americans and we’ve invested billions of dollars in research and development to build and improve them. We compete fairly in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry. We disagree with today’s reports, which feature outdated and inaccurate allegations from commercial rivals about Search and other services.

Americans simply don’t want Congress to break Google’s products or harm the free services they use every day. The goal of antitrust law is to protect consumers, not help commercial rivals. Many of the proposals bandied about in today’s reports — whether breaking up companies or undercutting Section 230 — would cause real harm to consumers, America’s technology leadership and the U.S. economy — all for no clear gain.

We support Congress focusing on areas where clearer laws would help consumers, a few of which are mentioned in today’s reports: Google has long championed the importance of data portability and open mobile platforms; we are arguing a case before the Supreme Court tomorrow for the important principle of software interoperability; and we have urged Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation. We look forward to engaging with Congress on these and other issues moving forward.

TechCrunch’s Taylor Hatmaker contributed to this report 

News: Truecaller tops 250 million users

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Popular caller-identification service Truecaller has amassed 250 million monthly active users and 200 million daily active users, demonstrating an accelerated pace of growth in recent quarters even as a global pandemic has hurt most businesses, it said on Wednesday. The service, run by eponymous Stockholm-headquartered firm, allows users to avoid spam calls by identifying the

Popular caller-identification service Truecaller has amassed 250 million monthly active users and 200 million daily active users, demonstrating an accelerated pace of growth in recent quarters even as a global pandemic has hurt most businesses, it said on Wednesday.

The service, run by eponymous Stockholm-headquartered firm, allows users to avoid spam calls by identifying the callers and also filters similar texts. The service is popular in many parts of the world, but India, where everyone receives dozens of such calls each month, is Truecaller’s biggest market.

Even as Apple and Google have improved the caller ID feature in their mobile operating systems in recent years and taken several other steps to curb spam calls, Truecaller’s offerings remain unmatched.

Truecaller had 200 million monthly active users in February this year, and it reached 100 million daily active users milestone in April 2018. More than 150 million of its monthly active user base are in India. In fact, Truecaller is the only app not made by Google or Facebook on the list of top 10 most used apps in the country, according to mobile insights firm App Annie (data of which an industry exec shared with TechCrunch).

In recent years, Truecaller has expanded its platform to add messaging and payments services, which has also allowed it to broaden the scope to monetize users. The company told TechCrunch that its revenue grew 90% in the quarter that ended in September, compared to the same period last year. Earlier this year, the company launched a new product that allows businesses to authenticate users on their apps without giving them a call.

The 11-year-old, Sequoia Capital -backed firm is also preparing to go public within the next two years, its co-founder and chief executive Alan Mamedi told TechCrunch in an interview early this year.

On Wednesday, Truecaller also announced it has appointed Fredrik Kjell as its new Chief Operating Officer. Kjell previously served as Chief Product Officer at Kindred Group, an online gambling company.

“With Fredrik’s strong operational background from previous consumer companies, and vast experience in a large publicly traded company, we believe he will be a great addition to the company and the global executive team. We’re on an exciting journey to take Truecaller to the next level, and this is a great step towards it,” said Mamedi in a statement.

News: Dictionary app Reverso launches desktop app

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Language learning company Reverso is launching its desktop app for macOS and Windows. Like on mobile, it lets you access a translation dictionary and get examples in context. The company has attracted 40,000 downloads in two days. While Google Translate is massively successful, Reverso has managed to attract 20 million downloads on iOS and Android.

Language learning company Reverso is launching its desktop app for macOS and Windows. Like on mobile, it lets you access a translation dictionary and get examples in context. The company has attracted 40,000 downloads in two days.

While Google Translate is massively successful, Reverso has managed to attract 20 million downloads on iOS and Android. Most users come from France, Italy, Russia and the U.S. The company’s websites also attract tens of millions of unique visitors every month who generate over 500 million page views.

Thanks to the new desktop app, you can access Reverso more quickly when you’re using your computer. You can highlight a word or a few words in any app and search for those words in Reverso with a keyboard shortcut. It automatically switches to the app window with your query.

You can also access synonyms from the app and hear the pronunciation of a word. Like on mobile, the app is free and there’s an optional subscription to access more features.

In other news, Reverso recently launched Reverso Documents, a service that lets you upload your document and get a translation with your original layout. You can review and edit the translation before downloading your document. Behind the scene, the company has improved its neural machine translation technologies for this kind of products.

Reverso Documents supports Word, PowerPoint, PDF and Excel files. There are 50,000 people using Reverso Documents every month. You can pay a one-time fee or pay a subscription to access the service.

The company also works with corporate clients to help them translate user guides, internal guidelines and more. Companies can upload documents that have already been translated so that Reverso can learn about your specific vocabulary. Clients include banks and car manufacturers.

Reverso is diversifying its revenue beyond web ads. And the company has a large user base at the top of the funnel that could end up interacting with more Reverso products down the road.

News: Elvie adds a non-electric breast pump and cups to its growing femtech portfolio

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Femtech hardware maker Elvie has added a softer, hands-free breast pump that uses natural suction to its portfolio two years after launching its debut ‘next-gen’ connected breast pump. The Elvie Curve is described as “a wearable, silicone breast pump that allows for gentle hands-free expression when feeding or pumping from the other breast — or

Femtech hardware maker Elvie has added a softer, hands-free breast pump that uses natural suction to its portfolio two years after launching its debut ‘next-gen’ connected breast pump.

The Elvie Curve is described as “a wearable, silicone breast pump that allows for gentle hands-free expression when feeding or pumping from the other breast — or to express full breasts” — suggesting the UK-based startup intends for it to supplement the more expensive (and electronic) Elvie Pump.

The Elvie Curve is priced at RRP £49.99 vs around £250 for the Pump. The Pump is also slightly more capacious, holding up to 5 oz of milk compared to up to 4 oz for the Curve. The Curve is similarly designed to sit discreetly inside a bra.

As the Curve uses natural suction there’s no batteries (nor connectivity) involved. But Elvie says a valve lets the user control the suction strength — for a comfortable, low effort experience.

The startup has launched another new (non-connected) device today, called the Elvie Catch (RRP £29.99). This consists of a set of two slip-proof milk collection cups to prevent leaks, also designed to fit neatly inside a bra.

Elvie says the cups can be used “during feeding, pumping or on the go”.

“Unlike many other breast shells and nipple pads, Elvie Catch sits securely in a bra to prevent leaks and is reusable, collecting up to 1 oz of breastmilk per cup so nothing goes to waste,” it adds in a press release.

Last year the London-based startup raised a $42M Series B funding round, led by IPGL, which it said would be used to support the release of four additional women’s health products. (The company’s debut product was a connected pelvic floor exerciser, which it continues to sell as the Elvie Trainer.)

Commenting on its freshly expanded portfolio in a statement, CEO and co-founder, Tania Boler, said: “Elvie Curve and Elvie Catch mark the next steps in Elvie’s mission to modernise breastfeeding and pumping products so they fit into the lives of real, modern-day mums.

“We launched the silent, wireless and wearable Elvie Pump two years ago to make pumping a hands-free experience that empowers mums to pump on their own terms. But we know that the challenges of breastfeeding go beyond pumping.

“Breast milk is liquid gold, so these products are designed to make the most of every last drop – as well as fitting seamlessly (and discreetly) into the lives of mums, like all Elvie products!”

Both new products are slated as available to buy via Elvie’s website from today — but at the time of writing they’re listed as ‘wait list’ only.