Monthly Archives: December 2020

News: Cloudflare is testing a Netlify competitor to host Jamstack sites

• December 7, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Cloudflare is working on a new product called Cloudflare Pages. The new product could compete directly with Netlify and Vercel, two cloud hosting companies that let you build and deploy sites using Jamstack frameworks. Popular Jamstack frameworks include Gatsby, Jekyll, Hugo, Vue.js, Next.js, etc. The new product was discovered on Saturday by reverse engineerJane Manchun

Cloudflare is working on a new product called Cloudflare Pages. The new product could compete directly with Netlify and Vercel, two cloud hosting companies that let you build and deploy sites using Jamstack frameworks. Popular Jamstack frameworks include Gatsby, Jekyll, Hugo, Vue.js, Next.js, etc.

The new product was discovered on Saturday by reverse engineerJane Manchun Wong, who found details by looking into Cloudflare’s code.

If you’re not familiar with Jamstack, it’s a popular way of developing and deploying websites at scale. It lets you take advantage of global edge networks with a focus on performance.

Let’s say you’re a very famous pop artist and you’re launching your new album on your website tomorrow. You expect to get a huge traffic spike and a ton of orders.

If you also happen to be a web developer, you could develop a Jamstack website to make sure that your website remains available and loads quickly. Instead of using a traditional content management system to host your content and deliver it to your users, a Jamstack framework lets you decouple the frontend from the backend.

You could write a few posts in your content management system and then deploy your website update. Your Jamstack application will prebuild static pages based on what you just wrote. Those pages will be cached on a global edge network and served in a few milliseconds across the world. It’s like photocopying a letter instead of writing a new copy every time somebody wants to read it.

But what if somebody wants to buy your new album on the buy page? On that page, there will be a checkout module, which is dynamic content that can’t be cached. You can leverage a payments API, such as Stripe, so that the user doesn’t load content from your server at all.

This is a simple example, but many companies have been going down this path. For static content, everything is prebuilt and cached. For dynamic content, companies build microservices that are loaded on demand and that can scale easily.

According to Jane Manchun Wong’s screenshots, Cloudflare Pages lets you deploy sites with a simple Git commit. It integrates directly with your GitHub repository if you’re hosting your source code on the platform.

You can configure a Node.js build command that will be executed every time you change something to your code. Once the build process is done, your website is accessible to your end users.

There will be a free tier for Cloudflare Pages, which lets you generate 500 builds per month. Above that quota, Cloudflare will most likely let you pay for more builds and more features.

By default, Cloudflare gives you a subdomain name to try out the service — your-website-name.pages.dev. Of course, you can configure your own domain name and combine Cloudflare Pages with other Cloudflare products.

You can already read Cloudflare Pages’ documentation, as spotted by Jane Manchun Wong. So it sounds like Cloudflare Pages could launch sooner rather than later.

News: The cloud can’t solve all your problems

• December 7, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Designing a startup for scale means investing in the right technology today to underpin your future growth.

The way a team functions and communicates dictates the operational efficiency of a startup and sets the scene for its culture. It’s way more important than what social events and perks are offered, so it’s the responsibility of a founder and/or CEO to provide their team with a technology approach that will empower them to achieve and succeed — now and in the future.

With that in mind, moving to the cloud might seem like a no-brainer because of its huge benefits around flexibility, accessibility and the potential to rapidly scale, while keeping budgets in check.

But there’s an important consideration here: Cloud providers won’t magically give you efficient teams.

It will get you going in the right direction, but you need to think even farther ahead. Designing a startup for scale means investing in the right technology today to underpin growth for tomorrow and beyond. Let’s look at how you approach and manage your cloud infrastructure will impact the effectiveness of your teams and your ability to scale.

Hindsight is 20/20

Adopting cloud is easy, but adopting it properly with best practices and in a secure way? Not so much. You might think that when you move to cloud, the cloud providers will give you everything you need to succeed. But even though they’re there to provide a wide breadth of services, these services won’t necessarily have the depth that you will need to run efficiently and effectively.

Yes, your cloud infrastructure is working now, but think beyond the first prototype or alpha and toward production. Considering where you want to get to, and not just where you are, will help you avoid costly mistakes. You definitely don’t want to struggle through redefining processes and ways of working when you’re also managing time sensitivities and multiple teams.

If you don’t think ahead, you’ll have to put all new processes in. It will take a whole lot longer, cost more money and cause a lot more disruption to teams than if you do it earlier.

For any founder, making strategic technology decisions right now should be a primary concern. It feels more natural to put off those decisions until you come face to face with the problem, but you’ll just end up needing to redo everything as you scale and cause your teams a world of hurt. If you don’t give this problem attention at the beginning, you’re just scaling the problems with the team. Flaws are then embedded within your infrastructure, and they’ll continue to scale with the teams. When these things are rushed, corners are cut and you will end up spending even more time and money on your infrastructure.

Build effective teams and reduce bottlenecks

When you’re making strategic decisions on how to approach your technology stack and cloud infrastructure, the biggest consideration should be what makes an effective team. Given that, keep these things top of mind:

• Speed of delivery: Having developers able to self-serve cloud infrastructure with best practices built-in will enable speed. Development tools that factor in visibility and communication integrations for teams will give transparency on how they are iterating, problems, bugs or integration failures.
• Speed of testing: This is all about ensuring fast feedback loops as your team works on critical new iterations and features. Developers should be able to test as much as possible locally and through continuous integration systems before they are ready for code review.
• Troubleshooting problems: Good logging, monitoring and observability services, gives teams awareness of issues and the ability to resolve problems quickly or reproduce customer complaints in order to develop fixes.
  

  

News: Microsoft announces its first Azure data center region in Denmark

• December 7, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Microsoft continues to expand its global Azure data center presence at a rapid clip. After announcing new regions in Austria and Taiwan in October, the company today revealed its plans to launch a new region in Denmark. As with many of Microsoft’s recent announcements, the company is also attaching a commitment to provide digital skills

Microsoft continues to expand its global Azure data center presence at a rapid clip. After announcing new regions in Austria and Taiwan in October, the company today revealed its plans to launch a new region in Denmark.

As with many of Microsoft’s recent announcements, the company is also attaching a commitment to provide digital skills to 200,000 people in the country (in this case, by 2024).

“With this investment, we’re taking the next step in our longstanding commitment to provide Danish society and businesses with the digital tools, skills and infrastructure needed to drive sustainable growth, innovation, and job creation. We’re investing in Denmark’s digital leap into the future – all in a way that supports the country’s ambitious climate goals and economic recovery,” said Nana Bule, General Manager, Microsoft Denmark.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The new data center, which will be powered by 100% renewable energy and feature multiple availability zones, will feature support for what has now become the standard set of Microsoft cloud products: Azure, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

As usual, the idea here is to provide low-latency access to Microsoft’s tools and services. It has long been Microsoft’s strategy to blanket the globe with local data centers. Europe is a prime example of this, with regions (both operational and announced) in about a dozen countries already. In the U.S., Azure currently offers 13 regions (including three exclusively for government agencies), with a new region on the West Coast coming soon.

“This is a proud day for Microsoft in Denmark,” said Brad Smith, President, Microsoft. “Building a hyper-scale datacenter in Denmark means we’ll store Danish data in Denmark, make computing more accessible at even faster speeds, secure data with our world-class security, protect data with Danish privacy laws, and do more to provide to the people of Denmark our best digital skills training. This investment reflects our deep appreciation of Denmark’s green and digital leadership globally and our commitment to its future.”

News: Cloudflare lets you control where data is stored and accessible

• December 7, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Cloudflare has launched a new set of features today called the Data Localization Suite. Companies on the Enterprise plan can choose to enable the features through an add-on. With the Data Localization Suite, Cloudflare is making it easier to control where your data is stored and if you’re authorized to view data depending on where

Cloudflare has launched a new set of features today called the Data Localization Suite. Companies on the Enterprise plan can choose to enable the features through an add-on.

With the Data Localization Suite, Cloudflare is making it easier to control where your data is stored and if you’re authorized to view data depending on where you are accessing it from. It’s a feature that lets you take advantage of Cloudflare’s products, such as serverless infrastructure, while complying with local and industry-specific regulation.

For instance, the Data Localization Suite seems particularly relevant following this year’s EU ruling that ended the Privacy Shield. If you’re operating in a highly regulated industry, such as healthcare and legal, you may have some specific data requirements as well.

Let’s say you’re building an application that should store data in the European Union exclusively. You could choose to run your application in a single data center, or a single cloud region. But that doesn’t scale well if you expect to get customers all around the world. You could also suffer from outages.

With Cloudflare’s approach, everything is encrypted at rest and in transit (if you enforce mandatory TLS encryption). You can choose to manage your private keys yourself, or you can choose to set different rules for your private keys.

For instance, a private key that lets you inspect traffic could be accessible from a European data center exclusively. Now that the Privacy Shield is invalid, this setup makes it easier to comply with European regulation.

Cloudflare inspects network requests in order to know what to do with them. For instance, the company tries to reject malicious bot requests automatically. You can choose to inspect those requests in a region in particular. If a malicious bot is running on a server in the U.S., the request will be sent to the closest Cloudflare data center in the U.S., routed to a data center in Europe and then inspected.

As for traffic logs and metadata, you can use Edge Log Delivery to send logs directly from Cloudflare’s edge network to a storage bucket or an on-premise data center. It doesn’t transit through Cloudflare’s core data centers at all.

Finally, if you’re using the recently announced Cloudflare Workers Durable Objects, you can configure jurisdiction restriction. If you run an app on Cloudflare’s serverless infrastructure, you can choose to avoid storing durable objects in some locations for regulation purposes.

As you can see, there are several tools and services in the Data Localization Suite. Some of them have already been live and others are brand new. But it’s interesting to see that Cloudflare is thinking about locality even though it thinks serverless computing and edge data centers are the future.

News: The IPO market looks hot as Airbnb and C3.ai raise price targets

• December 7, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

So much for a December slowdown — this morning, Airbnb and C3.ai raised their IPO price ranges and we got early pricing information from Upstart and Wish.

So much for a December slowdown — this morning, Airbnb and C3.ai raised their IPO price ranges and we got early pricing information from Upstart and Wish.

This gives us a good amount of ground to cover. So, we’ll dig into Airbnb’s new price range first, working to understand how richly investors are valuing the American home-sharing unicorn. We’ll repeat the experiment with C3.ai, a company we find utterly fascinating. Then we’ll calculate valuation ranges for both Upstart, a consumer lending fintech, and Wish, an e-commerce giant, to see where they stand.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

There are other IPOs in the wings: We’re still waiting on early pricing information from Affirm and Roblox, and DoorDash raised its range last week.

The upcoming calendar is busy. C3.ai and DoorDash should price tomorrow and trade Wednesday. Airbnb should price Wednesday and trade Thursday. Upstart will price next Tuesday and trade the following day.

In normal times, we’d take each element of today’s IPO news fusillade and parse it in its own post. But we only have 10 fingers, so let’s double-time through the numbers and get to what matters while you drink coffee. To work!

Airbnb and C3.ai

Public investors are bidding shares of both Airbnb and C3.ai up ahead of their debuts.

This morning, C3.ai, a company that sells enterprise AI technology, raised its IPO price range from $31-$34 to $36-$38 per share. It both raised and tightened its range, the latter often happening as a company gets a better handle on where demand lies as it ramps toward final pricing and eventual trading.

There are two ways to calculate the company’s new valuation range. The first uses the company’s nondiluted, expected post-IPO share count of 98,655,627, a figure that includes a little more than 2 million shares reserved for underwriters. At that share count, C3.ai would be worth between $3.57 billion and $3.77 billion.

News: California’s CA Notify app to offer statewide exposure notification using Apple and Google’s framework

• December 7, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

The state of California has now expanded access of its CA Notify app to all in the state, after originally deploying the app in a pilot program at UC Berkeley in November, which later expanded to other UC campuses. The statewide launch of the app, announced by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday, means that

The state of California has now expanded access of its CA Notify app to all in the state, after originally deploying the app in a pilot program at UC Berkeley in November, which later expanded to other UC campuses. The statewide launch of the app, announced by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday, means that the tool based on Apple and Google’s exposure notification API will be available for download and opt-in use to anyone with a compatible iPhone or Android device as of this Thursday, December 10.

Apple and Google’s jointly-developed exposure notification API uses Bluetooth to determine contact between confirmed COVID-positive individuals and others, alerting users to potential exposure without storing or transmitting any data related to their identity or location. The system uses a randomized, rolling identifier to communicate possible exposure to other devices, and individual state health authorities can customize specific details like how close, and for how long individuals need to be in contact in order to quality as an exposure risk.

In the case of California, the state has set contact with a confirmed COVID-19 positive individual of within 6 feet, for a period of 15 minutes or more as meriting an exposure notification. Users who receive a positive COVID-19 test will get a text message from the Department of Public Health for the state that contains a code they input in the CA Notify app in order to trigger an alert broadcast to any phones that met the criteria above during the prior 14 days (the period during which the virus is transmissible).

As mentioned, there’s no personal information transmitted from a user’s device via the notification system, and it’s a fully opt-in arrangement. Other states have already deployed exposure notification apps based on the Apple/Google API, as have many other countries around the world. It’s not a replacement for a contact tracing system, in which healthcare professionals attempt to determine who a COVID-19 patient came in contact with to find out how they might have contracted the virus, and to whom they may spread it, but it is a valuable component of a comprehensive tracing program that can improve its efficacy and success.

News: Don’t miss the university research showcase at TC Sessions: Space 2020

• December 7, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

We are T-minus one week until TC Sessions: Space 2020 lifts off on December 16-17. Join the global space community’s leading experts, brightest visionaries and rising stars for two days dedicated to space technology and exploration — and the opportunities they offer. Speaking of opportunity, you don’t want to miss our University Showcase sessions featuring

We are T-minus one week until TC Sessions: Space 2020 lifts off on December 16-17. Join the global space community’s leading experts, brightest visionaries and rising stars for two days dedicated to space technology and exploration — and the opportunities they offer.

Speaking of opportunity, you don’t want to miss our University Showcase sessions featuring the latest research from top universities, hosted by The Aerospace Corporation. Hold up now, what’s that? You don’t have a pass yet? Don’t fret, simply buy a late registration ticket or take advantage of our discounts for groups, students and active military/government employees. Want even more visibility? Get a Space Startup Exhibitor Package and gain global exposure for your business.

Okay, back to the University Showcase sessions. Up until now, space exploration and technology has always been tied to orbiting, observing and reporting back to earth. But it’s time to take on a new, expanded commitment — to boldly go into space — and stay there, i.e. space exploration, commerce and habitation. It means moving humans beyond planet Earth and out into the solar system. That requires bold people building new technology and forging the next generation of space capabilities. Talk about a galactic-sized goal.

The University Showcase sessions — in two parts, one on each day of the conference — will feature scientists and academics from USC, MIT, UCLA, ASU and Caltech, Aerospace Corporation’s partners, sharing insights on their space research and highlighting a range of emerging space technologies.

Through partnership with the Aerospace Corporation, emerging capabilities — in communication, navigation and space exploration — can be evaluated and integrated into government missions with NASA, NOAA and the Air Force.

As always, TechCrunch delivers the top experts, and this University Showcase sessions are no exception. Over the course of the two sessions, you’ll hear from Randy Villahermosa (General Manager & Executive Director of Innovation, The Aerospace Corporation), Dr. Richard Linares (Co-Director, Space Systems Lab, MIT), David A Barnhart (Director, Space Engineering Research Center; Research Professor, USC), Kerri Cahoy (Associate Professor, Aeronautics & Astronautics, MIT), Bethany Ehlmann (Professor of Planetary Science, Caltech – Lunar Trailblazer Mission), Craig Hardgrove, (Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University) and Dr. James M. Weygand (Space Physicist, Department of Earth, Planetary & Space Science, UCLA).

Click here to learn more about our university partners, their specific areas of expertise and the emerging technologies they will discuss.

TC Sessions: Space 2020 promises two days of connection, education, inspiration and lots of opportunity. Don’t have a pass? Get yours right here. Join other bold visionaries, check the program-packed agenda and plan your schedule now.

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.

News: Google adds support for Apple Music to its Google Assistant-enabled smart speakers and displays

• December 7, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Google announced this morning it’s adding support for Apple Music to its Google Nest smart speakers, and other Google Assistant-enabled smart speakers and displays in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Japan. This means Google’s flagship smart speaker devices, including Nest Audio, Nest Hub Max, and Nest Mini, will now be able to play Apple

Google announced this morning it’s adding support for Apple Music to its Google Nest smart speakers, and other Google Assistant-enabled smart speakers and displays in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Japan. This means Google’s flagship smart speaker devices, including Nest Audio, Nest Hub Max, and Nest Mini, will now be able to play Apple Music songs, albums and playlists by way of voice commands, as will others.

The update makes Google’s own smart speakers more competitive with both Apple’s HomePod and newer HomePod Mini, as well as Alexa-enabled smart speakers like the Echo, which has supported Apple Music since late 2018.

To stream from Apple Music, Google device owners will need to first link their Apple Music account in the Google Home app then optionally set it as their default music service. After doing so, they’ll be able to use voice commands like “Hey Google, play New Music Daily playlist” or “Hey Google, play Rap Life playlist,” for example, or ask for any other specific song, artist or playlist the service offers.

Users will also be able to ask Google Assistant to stream music based on genre, mood, or activity, or they can request Apple Music to stream from their own library of songs by saying, “Hey Google, play my library.”

Apple Music will also work in multi-device households, allowing Google device owners to stream across all their speakers at once, or to move music from one device to the others.

Today, many Google smart speakers owners may use a third-party service like Spotify, Pandora or Deezer — which are already supported in the Google Home app. But those who had been longtime Google Play Music customers have more recently had to make a decision as to whether to jump ship to a new service or stay within Google’s ecosystem, following the Google Play Music service shut down which saw the service merge with YouTube Music. As a result, some former Google Play Music customers moved to Apple Music to leverage its library feature.

Apple Music allow users to have up to 100,000 songs in their music library, which appeals to some of Google Play Music’s past customers. It also offers over 70 million songs for on-demand, ad-free streaming.

Google says the new Apple Music support is rolling out starting today to supported devices.

News: Tecton.ai nabs $35M Series B as it releases machine learning feature store

• December 7, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Tecton.ai, the startup founded by three former Uber engineers who wanted to bring the machine learning feature store idea to the masses, announced a $35 million Series B today, just seven months after announcing their $20 million Series A. When we spoke to the company in April, it was working with early customers in a

Tecton.ai, the startup founded by three former Uber engineers who wanted to bring the machine learning feature store idea to the masses, announced a $35 million Series B today, just seven months after announcing their $20 million Series A.

When we spoke to the company in April, it was working with early customers in a beta version of the product, but today, in addition to the funding they are also announcing the general availability of the platform.

As with their Series A, this round has Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital coming back to co-lead the investment. The company has now raised $60 million.

The reason these two firms are so committed to Tecton is the specific problem around machine learning the company is trying to solve. “We help organizations put machine learning into production. That’s the whole goal of our company, helping someone build an operational machine learning application, meaning an application that’s powering their fraud system or something real for them […] and making it easy for them to build and deploy and maintain,” company CEO and co-founder Mike Del Balso explained.

They do this by providing the concept of a feature store, an idea they came up with and which is becoming a machine learning category unto itself. Just last week, AWS announced the Sagemaker Feature store, which the company saw as major validation of their idea.

As Tecton defines it, a feature store is an end-to-end machine learning management system that includes the pipelines to transform the data into what are called feature values, then it stores and manages all of that feature data and finally it serves a consistent set of data.

Del Balso says this works hand-in-hand with the other layers of a machine learning stack. “When you build a machine learning application, you use a machine learning stack that could include a model training system, maybe a model serving system or an MLOps kind of layer that does all the model management, and then you have a feature management layer, a feature store which is us — and so we’re an end-to-end lifecycle for the data pipelines,” he said.

With so much money behind the company it is growing fast, going from 17 employees to 26 since we spoke in April with plans to more than double that number by the end of next year. Del Balso says he and his co-founders are committed to building a diverse and inclusive company, but he acknowledges it’s not easy to do.

“It’s actually something that we have a primary recruiting initiative on. It’s very hard, and it takes a lot of effort, it’s not something that you can just make like a second priority and not take it seriously,” he said. To that end, the company has sponsored and attended diversity hiring conferences and has focused its recruiting efforts on finding a diverse set of candidates, he said.

Unlike a lot of startups we’ve spoken to, Del Balso wants to return to an office setup as soon as it is feasible to do so, seeing it as a way to build more personal connections between employees.

News: Tinder makes it easier to report bad actors using ‘unmatch’ to hide from victims

• December 7, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Last month, Bumble introduced a new feature that would prevent bad actors from using the dating app’s “unmatch” feature to hide from victims. Now Tinder has done something similar. The company announced on Friday it will soon roll out an update to its app that will make it easier for users to report someone who

Last month, Bumble introduced a new feature that would prevent bad actors from using the dating app’s “unmatch” feature to hide from victims. Now Tinder has done something similar. The company announced on Friday it will soon roll out an update to its app that will make it easier for users to report someone who has used the unmatch feature in an effort to get away with their abuse. But in Tinder’s case, it’s only making it easier for users to learn how to report the violation, rather than giving the victims a button in the chat interface to report the abuse more directly.

Tinder notes that users have always been able to report anyone on the app at any time — even if the person had used the unmatch feature. But few users likely knew how to do so, since there weren’t obvious explanations in the app’s user interface about how to report a chat after it disappeared.

With the update, Tinder says it will soon add its “Safety Center” shield icon within the Match List, where the chats take place. This will direct users to the Safety Center in the app, where they can learn how to report users who aren’t displayed on the Match List because they used the unmatch feature.

Image Credits: Tinder

The updates to both Tinder and Bumble came about following an investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which found that 48 out of 231 survey respondents who had used Tinder said they had reported other users for some kind of sexual offense. But only 11 of those reports had received any replies, and even fewer offered specific information about what was being done.

The story had also explained how bad actors would take advantage of the dating app’s “unmatch” feature to hide from their victims. After unmatching, their chat history would disappear from the victim’s phone, which would have allowed the user to more easily report the abuse to Tinder or even to law enforcement, if needed.

Though Tinder was the focus of the story, Bumble quickly followed up to say it was changing how unmatching on its app would work. Instead of having the chat disappear when unmatched, Bumble users are now shown a message that says the other person has ended the chat. Here, they’re given the option to also either delete the chat or report it.

The ability to report the chat directly from the messaging inbox is what makes Bumble’s solution more useful. Tinder, on the other hand, is just redirecting users to what’s essentially its help documentation — the Tinder Safety Center — to learn how to go about making such a report. The addition of this extra step could end up being a deterrent to making these reports, as it’s less straightforward than simply clicking a button that reads “Report.”

Tinder also didn’t address the other issues raised by the investigation, which said many reports lacked follow-up or clear information about what actions Tinder was taking to address the issues.

Instead, the company says that it will continue to acknowledge when reports are received to let the member making the report know an appropriate action will be taken. Tinder added it will also direct users to trained resources for crisis counseling and survivor support; remove accounts it finds have been reported for violent crimes; and will continue to work with law enforcement on investigations, when required. These actions, however, should be baseline features for any dating app, not points of pride.

Tinder stressed, too, that it would not remove the unmatch feature, which is necessary for safety and privacy of its members. That seems to miss the point of what users’ complaints were about. Tinder users were not angry or concerned that an unmatching feature existed in the first place, but that it was being used by bad actors to avoid repercussions for their abuse.

The company didn’t say precisely when the changes to the dating app would roll out, beyond the “coming weeks.”

Today, Tinder parent company also announced a partnership with RAINN, a large anti-sexual violence organization, to conduct “a comprehensive review of sexual misconduct reporting, moderation, and response across Match Group’s dating platforms” and “to work together to improve current safety systems and tools.”

The organization will review Tinder, Hinge, and Plenty of Fish to determine what best practices should be. Match says the partnership begins today and will continue through 2021.

“Every person deserves safe and respectful experiences, and we want to do our part to create safer communities on our platforms and beyond,” said Tracey Breeden, Head of Safety and Social Advocacy for Match Group, in a statement. “By working together with courageous, thought-leading organizations like RAINN, we will up level safety processes and strengthen our responses for survivors of sexual assault. Safety challenges touch every corner of society. We are committed to creating actionable solutions by working collaboratively with experts to innovate on meaningful, industry-led safety approaches,” she added.