April 2021 – Page 11 – Digital Pulse

News: Zomato juice: Indian unicorn’s proposed IPO could drive regional startup liquidity

April 28, 2021
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The IPO parade that has continued in 2021 is not a strictly domestic affair. Other countries are getting in on the unicorn liquidity rush. This week, India-based food-delivery unicorn Zomato filed to go public. As TechCrunch reported, the company intends to list “on Indian stock exchanges NSE and BSE.” The Zomato IPO is incredibly important.

The IPO parade that has continued in 2021 is not a strictly domestic affair. Other countries are getting in on the unicorn liquidity rush.

This week, India-based food-delivery unicorn Zomato filed to go public. As TechCrunch reported, the company intends to list “on Indian stock exchanges NSE and BSE.”

The Zomato IPO is incredibly important. As our own Manish Singh reported when the company’s numbers became public, a “successful listing [could be] poised to encourage nearly a dozen other unicorn Indian startups to accelerate their efforts to tap the public markets.” So, Zomato’s debut is not only notable because its impending listing gives us a look into its economics, but because it could lead to a liquidity rush in the country if its flotation goes well.

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

At this point, we’ll pause and note that India is currently enduring a COVID-19 surge that may be without precedent. You can provide help here. May the pandemic abate quickly and with as little pain as possible.

Back to Zomato: The company’s IPO filing paints the picture of a quickly growing company derailed by the pandemic. However, the unicorn has posted rapid recovery in recent quarters, and its economics are maturing to the point when it can begin to craft a path to long-term profitability. This morning, let’s dig into its numbers and try to sort out why the company is going public now and how investors may vet its recent performance.

Zomato’s business

Zomato was last valued at around $5.4 billion in a February 2021 round that put $250 million into its operations. The unicorn has raised more than $2 billion to date, per Crunchbase data.

In business terms, Zomato offers more than merely food delivery. Per its IPO filing, the company’s food delivery business is supplemented by its “dining-out” capability that facilitates in-person eating, a raw materials business called “Hyperpure,” and Zomato Pro, a consumer offering that provides food discounts to its 1.4 million subscribers.

So we can’t merely compare the firm to, say, Uber Eats — the India operations of which Zomato bought back in the day — on a one-to-one basis.

But what we can track is the company’s aggregate financial performance through the end of 2020. The Zomato filing does not appear to include information regarding the company’s calendar Q1 2021 performance; that period, for reference, is the fourth quarter of the company’s fiscal 2021.

Let’s start from a very high level:

Fiscal year ending March 31, 2019: $187.4 million in total revenue, and a loss before exceptional items of $296.3 million.
Fiscal year ending March 31, 2020: $367.8 million in total revenue, and a loss before exceptional items of $303.5 million
Nine-month period ending December 31, 2020: $183.4 million in total revenue, and a loss before exceptional items of $47.8 million

News: 3D printing marketplace Shapeways set for SPAC

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Shapeways this morning confirmed earlier reports that it has entered into a deal to go public via SPAC. The model, which has become increasingly popular among tech companies in the past year, has already been taking up by a number of fellow 3D printing companies, including Markforged and Desktop Metal. “Our vision to enable anyone

Shapeways this morning confirmed earlier reports that it has entered into a deal to go public via SPAC. The model, which has become increasingly popular among tech companies in the past year, has already been taking up by a number of fellow 3D printing companies, including Markforged and Desktop Metal.

“Our vision to enable anyone to rapidly transform digital designs to physical products is reaching a significant milestone today as we transition Shapeways into a public company,” CEO Greg Kress said in a release tied to the news. “We have been successfully executing on our vision, and this capital will allow us to empower digital manufacturing at scale, accelerating Shapeways’ additive manufacturing capabilities while expanding the Company’s material and technology offerings to more markets and industries.”

Founded back in 2007, the New York-based company (with Dutch roots) offers 3D printing as a service. Specifically, it lets users outsource the printing of 3D printing objects to its own army of industrial units. Included in its services is a marketplace where users can buy and sell 3D printed objects.

The company, which has raised north of $107 million per Crunchbase, will enter into a reverse merge with blank firm, Galileo Acquisition Corp. The deal would value Shapeways at $410 million and provide upwards of $195 million in proceeds. The money will go toward, “accelerat[ing] Shapeways’ metal additive manufacturing capabilities, expand[ind] the company’s material and technology offerings to extend market reach and grow customer share of wallet as well as to provid[ing] additional working capital.”

The deal, which is subject to the standard regulatory scrutiny, would list the company as “SHPW” in the NYSE. It’s expected to close this summer.

Metal 3D printing company Markforged announces plans to go public via SPAC

News: Splitwise raises $20M Series A to help everyone in the world divvy expenses

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This morning Splitwise, a Providence, Rhode Island-based startup announced that it has closed a $20 million Series A. The company builds consumer fintech software that helps users split expenses. But Splitwise isn’t a Venmo or Paytm clone. Instead of helping users wire money to their pals, the company leaves the transference of money to others.

This morning Splitwise, a Providence, Rhode Island-based startup announced that it has closed a $20 million Series A.

The company builds consumer fintech software that helps users split expenses. But Splitwise isn’t a Venmo or Paytm clone. Instead of helping users wire money to their pals, the company leaves the transference of money to others. Splitwise simply wants to help reduce the stress and awkwardness that money puts on relationships of all sorts, CEO Jon Bittner told TechCrunch in an interview.

Roommates, partners, married couples with distinct finances, or just friends going on skiing trips all have to deal with shared expenses. And tracking down your friends or spouse or roomie for their cut of a cost is zero fun. Splitwise’s software makes it easier to track and come to terms with shared expenses. By keeping those costs in the open, and whom owes who, the app wants to keep debts clear so that folks don’t have to trip over each other when it comes to money.

The product concept has found a global audience. Per Bittner, Splitwise has attracted tens of millions of registered user who have shared or managed what it calculates to be $90 billion since 2011. The startup declined to share active user numbers, but as it is merely raising a Series A we gave it an early-stage pass on more concrete usage metrics.

Since Splitwise leaves the transference of monies amongst its users to others, it doesn’t make money off of transaction fees or stored consumer funds. So how does it make cash? By charging users $3 per month for its Pro service. Or more simply, Splitwise offers a consumer subscription to users who need more powerful cost-sharing software.

We lack metrics to illustrate how Splitwise’s subscription user-base looks, but Bittner said that the company’s conversion rate from free to paid has not declined as Splitwise’s free user base has scaled. We can infer, however, that as Insight Partners was willing to lead a $20 million investment into the company, its paid subscriber base is growing at at least a reasonable clip.

Before its Series A, Bittner told TechCrunch that his company had raised around $9 million.

Splitwise has long grown organically. As it was able to attract new users without paid spend, it managed to keep its costs low. That meant that it didn’t need to raise venture capital at the same velocity as some other consumer fintech companies. But by keeping its fundraising to a minimum, the company had to be somewhat careful in where it pointed its resources.

Its CEO said that Splitwise said that the new capital will allow the company to boost its product cadence.

But don’t expect all the money to go to making paid-only features. Splitwise was clear to TechCrunch that it wants its free experience to be sufficiently useful that users are willing to invite their friends to the service without risking bringing them into an overly-pushy commercial digital environment.

Its investors seem aligned with the thinking, with Insight Partners’ Boris Treskunov saying in a statement that he’s “excited to see the app become the go-to platform for easy cost-splitting among friends and family.” Mass adoption of that sort will require a robust free experience. Which means continued spend on the free-side of the startup’s freemium product work.

Splitwise is perhaps Providence’s best-known startup, though the recent Y Combinator graduate Pangea is giving it a run for its money lately when it comes to local notoriety. Regardless, the two companies are evidence that it’s possible to build growing tech companies outside of the handful of American cities most associated with startup work. Let’s see what Splitwise can do with its new capital, and what percent of its future hiring winds up being remote, versus local to its main hub.

Internal rates of return in emerging US tech hubs are starting to overtake Silicon Valley

News: How Shopify aims to level the playing field with its machine learning-driven model of lending

April 28, 2021
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Shopify is widely known for giving independent merchants a platform to start, run, market and manage their businesses. But over the past 5 years, the company has been steadily growing another part of its own business: Shopify Capital. Through this arm, the Canadian commerce giant revealed today that it has provided $2 billion in funding

Shopify is widely known for giving independent merchants a platform to start, run, market and manage their businesses.

But over the past 5 years, the company has been steadily growing another part of its own business: Shopify Capital. Through this arm, the Canadian commerce giant revealed today that it has provided $2 billion in funding to tens of thousands of entrepreneurs.

Besides being a cool milestone, how it works is interesting. Merchants don’t necessarily have to apply for loans. Shopify’s machine learning models identify eligible merchants based on their previous sales history and store performance, according to Solmaz Shahalizadeh, vice president of data science and engineering, commerce intelligence at Shopify. If a merchant accepts a pre-approved offer, they can generally receive funding in 2 to 5 business days.

While the milestone is significant, I was especially intrigued by the model by which Shopify lends money to its merchants.

It is intentional about using machine learning and AI “to make sure offers are based on factors different from any other in the financial industry,” Shahalizadeh said. “We don’t ask for a business plan. Our models see the business performance and it’s potential and makes an offer based on that.”

“We use 70 million data points to understand larger trends across the platform for merchants, and can see they are growing before they even can so we can preemptively offer them,” she added.

Kaz Nejatian, vice president of merchant services at Shopify, emphasizes that Shopify Capital does not lend in the manner of traditional banks by charging interest on loans.

“Our funding is designed to work off sales. If you don’t sell anything, we don’t get paid back until you make sales,” Nejatian said. “It’s a highly merchant aligned form of funding designed to fund the type of people banks and VCs won’t fund.”

The company’s model also aims to eliminate any biases that exist in the current financial system, when it comes to educational background, ethnicity, race or gender, he added.

For Nejatian, it’s also personal. His mother is a Shopify merchant who herself struggled with getting capital herself last year.

“Our goal is to reduce barriers to entrepreneurship by offering access to funds,” he said.

As part of that effort, Shopify Capital has increased the maximum amount of funding to $2 million. Previously, it granted funds ranging from $200 to $1 million.

Shopify offers two types of funding – merchant cash advances and loans. Shopify Capital charges a fixed fee (factor rate) on its financings.

On a merchant cash advance for example, it purchases $10,000 of a merchant’s future receivables in exchange for a promise to remit $10,900 of their future sales. The $900 is the amount it charges for the financing, and is repaid by a merchant’s daily remittances on days they make sales.

On its loans, it also applies a similar fixed fee to get a total repayment number, which is repaid via daily payments and milestone payments.

Simply put, the fixed fee that it charges is how Shopify earns money in exchange for funding our merchants. This fee, plus the amount advanced, are returned to the company over the life of a financing via daily remittance payments.

Says the company: “By charging a fixed fee, a merchant is able to understand exactly how much they’ll be expected to repay, before they take financing from Shopify Capital. These amounts don’t change over the life of a financing.”

Over time, Shopify plans to continually improve the machine learning algorithm behind Capital, making its predictive model “even smarter,” Shahalizadeh said.

“Our model allows us to predict merchants’ minimum sales with 90% accuracy while helping us make more proactive, pre-qualified offers as quickly as possible,” she added.

Shopify merchant Steven Borrelli, Founder of CUTS, says that when he was looking for funding as a newer business, he ran into the challenge of most traditional banks and lenders wanting to see that he had been in business for several years.

CUTS started with getting $2,000 in funding from Shopify Capital. Over the last three years, it has grown into a business with sales “in the tens of millions.”

“We found Shopify Capital to be so valuable that we’ve returned for 10 rounds of funding. Our most recent round of Shopify Capital was $1 million,” he said. “So far we’ve used the funding for expanding our product line and growing our inventory.”

News: Revel launches an all-electric, rideshare service with a fleet of 50 Teslas

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Revel started out in 2018 with shared, dockless e-mopeds in Brooklyn, which later expanded to Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx and a handful of other U.S. cities. This year, the company launched a monthly e-bike subscription in New York City and announced plans to build an electric vehicle charging hub in Bed-Stuy. Now, Revel is introducing

Revel started out in 2018 with shared, dockless e-mopeds in Brooklyn, which later expanded to Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx and a handful of other U.S. cities. This year, the company launched a monthly e-bike subscription in New York City and announced plans to build an electric vehicle charging hub in Bed-Stuy. Now, Revel is introducing an all-electric — and all-Tesla — rideshare service in Manhattan.

What once seemed like a company with an identity crisis dabbling at random with different forms of mobility is starting to come together as a calculated strategy to own the electrification infrastructure of cities, starting with NYC. This has been founder and CEO Frank Reig’s war cry from the start.

“From day one, our mission has been to electrify cities,” Reig told TechCrunch. “We do that by providing electric transportation options needed in cities, as well as building the electric vehicle infrastructure needed to make that happen.”

The new rideshare venture, which will launch in late May with a fleet of 50 Revel-branded Tesla Model Ys, is the natural next step in the process of working towards “electrifying every single trip in a city,” says Reig. Customers will be able to access ride-hailing services with the same app used to book e-mopeds. The launch will begin in a zone below 42nd Street, and will expand to additional neighborhoods based on demand and data from the initial phase, according to the company.

Revel’s rideshare launch is taking a similar approach to its initial moped launch three years ago, starting in a small area and slowly growing towards an overall goal of serving the entire city, according to co-founder Paul Suhey.

The company is still in the application process to become an approved operator with NYC’s Taxi & Limousine Commission. Revel’s initial application was approved, but there are a few more steps to acquiring a fully issued license.

“I think one reason we’re even coming out with this right now instead of waiting until everything is officially licensed and ready to go is because we’re employing drivers,” Suhey told TechCrunch. “When it comes to employing drivers, we need to get the word out. We need to be able to recruit and retain drivers now.”

Revel’s customer rates will be on par with competitors like Uber and Lyft, Reig says, but rather than relying on gig economy workers, the company intends to hire all of its drivers.

“For the same price, you’re able to get into a fully electric vehicle with a company that actually employs New Yorkers and doesn’t push all the insurance risk and asset depreciation onto New York City residents just trying to make a living,” said Reig.

Micromobility’s next big business is software, not vehicles

Paying workers is not just altruism for Revel. It makes more sense to employ drivers because the company needs to own the Teslas, in large part so they can be built to Revel’s specifications. The Model Ys will be painted “Revel-blue” and will include a touchscreen to control cabin conditions like temperature and music. The front passenger seat of the vehicles will be removed to both adhere to Covid-19 distancing guidelines and to allow riders to stretch their legs.

But more importantly, Revel learned a valuable lesson from the $200 million PR campaign from the likes of Uber, Lyft and Postmates to lobby Californians to vote for Proposition 22, a ballot initiative which would make the app-based companies exempt from treating workers as employees with benefits. The initiative passed, but Reig is of the opinion that that money could have gone towards attracting and maintaining a solid workforce, rather than constantly trying to fill the funnel of drivers with a disillusioned labor pool.

“There’s also a safety piece when you’re talking about a fleet,” said Reig. “Because it’s our fleet, we’re able to understand exactly the acceleration, the speed and the braking of the car at all times. Every single driver that we employ and train will be getting safety scores at the end of every shift so they can improve their driving. So now, we’re able to lower insurance costs and liabilities.”

As cities electrify, Revel wants to be the one scaffolding the business models going forward. Offering up a ride-hail is not just about building out a new business line. It’s also about accelerating the production of the company’s charging business. Revel’s trying to establish an electric monopoly while solving for the chicken-and-egg problem of prospective EV buyers who would buy electric if only there were charging stations and planners who would build EV infrastructure if only more people were buying EVs.

“Everything that we do as a company is about trying to drive EV adoption and access to electric mobility in cities,” said Suhey. “People think about that in terms of access to a different mode, whether that’s an electric car, an electric bike, a moped — we’re thinking more broadly about electrification in cities.”

Tamika Butler, Remix’s Tiffany Chu and Revel’s Frank Reig to discuss how to balance equitability and profitability at TC Sessions: Mobility

News: Dear Sophie: What’s the latest on DACA?

April 28, 2021
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My company is looking to hire a very talented data infrastructure engineer who is undocumented. She has never applied for DACA before. What is the latest on DACA? What can we do to support her?

Sophie Alcorn
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Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.

What’s the latest on DACA?

In good news for many in the United States, the DACA program has largely returned to what it was when the Obama administration created it through an executive order in 2012. At the end of last year, a federal judge ordered U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to accept and adjudicate new DACA applications, which had stopped in September 2017 when the previous administration announced it was ending DACA.

Moreover, President Joe Biden issued a memorandum on his first day in office stating that the secretary of Homeland Security, who oversees USCIS, should “fortify and preserve DACA.”

Your company can support an undocumented engineer by offering to pay for the services of an immigration attorney to assist her with filing applications for DACA and an employment authorization document (EAD), also known as a work permit. It may take several months for her applications to be processed. The approvals will allow her to be legally hired in the United States.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

What are the DACA requirements?

News: Botpress nabs $15M Series A to help developers build conversational apps

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Botpress, a Montreal-based early stage startup, wants to make it easier for developers to build conversational-based apps, meaning humans interact with the app by speaking instead of typing, clicking or tapping. Today it announced an $15 million Series A from Decibel and Inovia Capital. “We’re trying to bring human-level digital assistance to the masses, and

Botpress, a Montreal-based early stage startup, wants to make it easier for developers to build conversational-based apps, meaning humans interact with the app by speaking instead of typing, clicking or tapping. Today it announced an $15 million Series A from Decibel and Inovia Capital.

“We’re trying to bring human-level digital assistance to the masses, and we do that by giving developers the tools they need to build conversational AI applications, so essentially conversational AI. […] It’s a new way to build and consume software by using human language as a user interface instead of using traditional graphical user interfaces,” Botpress founder and CEO Sylvain Perron told me.

The company has created an open source toolkit to help developers remove some of the complexity associated with creating these applications. “Developers choose us because we provide the right tools to build conversational AI without changing the normal workflow of building software,” Perron explained.

Several years ago, Perron was trying to create a bot application and he just couldn’t find any good guidance to help him, so he decided to build a solution. He released the first version of that tool in 2017 and today he has more than 100,000 developers using the open source tool kit worldwide including a bunch of Fortune 500 companies.

Moveworks expands IT chatbot platform to encompass entire organization

Jon Sakoda who is leading the investment at Decibel says that the company is turning some of that enterprise interest into a business supporting those companies. “Today, we do have a commercial open source offering, which a lot of companies already pay for, but as I think you’ve seen in this current wave of successful open source companies, there’s always a lot of demand for a cloud product. And I think that this financing clearly allows Botpress to invest in building a turnkey cloud offering,” Sakoda says.

He says that what impresses him about Botpress is that developers can build a bot in less than an hour on a laptop, but having a cloud product will remove one more layer of complexity around deploying and scaling the bot in production.

The company, which has offices in Montreal and Quebec City (when they actually go to the office again), currently has 25 employees. The plan is to triple the team size over the next year as they put the investment to work. As they do this, Perron says that diversity and inclusion is a key goal in hiring.

“In our discussions, we want to make sure that we are a very inclusive company as we scale, especially scaling at this pace it’s very easy to […] fall into non inclusive ways, so that’s very top of mind for us, and we’re putting significant effort into making sure that we’re doing this right,” he said.

The company has been remote from its early days, and had just opened an office in Quebec City when the pandemic hit so they haven’t had much opportunity to use it. He expects to have a hybrid approach when they are allowed back in the office, but it will be up to employees whether they come in or not.

Chatbots spotlight machine learning’s trillion-dollar potential

News: Alchemy raises $80M at a $505M valuation to be the ‘AWS for blockchain’

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Blockchain developer platform Alchemy announced today it has raised $80 million in a Series B round of funding led by Coatue and Addition, Lee Fixel’s new fund. The company previously raised a total of $15.5 million, so the latest financing brings its total raised to $95.5 million since it launched in 2017. The latest round caught

Blockchain developer platform Alchemy announced today it has raised $80 million in a Series B round of funding led by Coatue and Addition, Lee Fixel’s new fund. The company previously raised a total of $15.5 million, so the latest financing brings its total raised to $95.5 million since it launched in 2017.

The latest round caught our attention for a few reasons.

First, the company, which describes itself as the backend technology behind the blockchain industry, went from public launch to a $505 million valuation in a matter of just eight months. During that time, Alchemy says it powered over $30 billion in transactions for tens of millions of users all over the world. Second, the startup says it also already powering the majority of the NFT industry.

And finally, its investors in the round include a high-profile mix of institutions and individuals such as DFJ Growth, K5 Global, the Chainsmokers, actor Jared Leto and the Glazer family (owners of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Manchester United). They joined existing backers including Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang, Pantera Capital, Coinbase, SignalFire, Samsung, Stanford University, Google chairman and Stanford University President John L. Hennessy, Charles Schwab, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and others.

Sources with inside knowledge of Alchemy’s operations tell TechCrunch that the company has already grown its business more than eightfold since it signed the Series B term sheet. They also said Alchemy had over $300 million of investor demand wanting to enter the round and is being inbounded to do another financing at “many times” the current valuation.

TechCrunch talked with Alchemy co-founders Nikil Viswanathan (CEO) and Joe Lau (CTO) about the raise and their passion for the startup’s mission was clear. As is its explosive growth.

“We realized that in order for space to thrive and build to its full potential, we needed to build a developer platform layer for blockchain,” Viswanathan told TechCrunch.

Alchemy’s goal is to be the starting place for developers considering to build a product on top of a blockchain or mainstream blockchain applications. Its developer platform aims to remove the complexity and costs of building infrastructure while improving applications through “necessary” developer tools.

The startup powers a range of transactions across nearly every blockchain vertical, including financial institutions, exchanges, billion-dollar decentralized finance projects and multinational organizations such as UNICEF. It has also quickly become the technology behind every major NFT platform, including Makersplace, OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, SuperRare and CryptoPunks.

“Every time you open DoorDash, you’re using Amazon’s infrastructure,” Lau said. “Every time you interact with an NFT, you’re using Alchemy. It’s being powered by Alchemy underneath the hood.”

While the pair would not provide hard revenue figures, the company – which operates as a SaaS business – says it increased its revenue by 600% in 2020.

For inside players, Alchemy’s efforts are paving the way for the whole industry.

“The cryptoeconomy is innovating faster than any technological movement that came before it, and Alchemy has been a key driver of that,” said Coinbase President and COO Emilie Choi. “Alchemy enables developers to build the rich ecosystem of applications necessary for mainstream blockchain adoption.”

Pantera Capital’s Paul Veradittakit describes Alchemy as “the Amazon Web Services (AWS) of the blockchain industry” that is “enabling the vision of a decentralized web.”

“While in Web 2.0, Microsoft, Apple and AWS are three of the most valuable companies in the world because they are the developer platform powering the computer and internet industries, Alchemy is primed to do the same for the blockchain,” he said.

Is rising usage driving crypto’s recent price boom?

The company believes the comparison to AWS is fair, noting that: “Just as AWS provides the platform that powers Uber, Netflix and much of the technology industry, Alchemy powers infrastructure for many large players in the blockchain industry.”

Alchemy plans to use its new capital to expand its developer platform to new blockchains, fuel global expansion and to open new offices in the U.S. and globally. The startup is based in San Francisco and is planning to open an office in New York.

“We are going to use the funds to support new chains with our developer platform,” Viswanathan said. “We also expect to 5x the team this year.”

But to be clear, Alchemy prides itself on being lean and mean.

“We just went from 14 to 22 employees,” Lau said. “We have intentionally wanted to keep the team as small as possible.”

The blockchain space has been the subject of increased investor interest as of late.

In March, BlockFi, which describes itself a financial services company for crypto market investors, announced it had closed on a massive $350 million Series D funding that valued it at $3 billion. Also last month, Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis company, revealed the close of $100 million in Series D financing, which doubled its valuation to over $2 billion.

Crypto boom continues as Chainalysis raises $100M, doubles valuation to over $2B

News: Here’s Samsung’s new flagship laptop series, the Galaxy Book Pro

April 28, 2021
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Following the customary weeks of leaks, Samsung just announced a couple of new additions to its laptop line. The Galaxy Book Pro and Galaxy Book Pro 360 joined the hardware giant’s wide range of devices toward the high end — offering what can reasonably be categorized as the company’s take on the MacBook Pro. The

Following the customary weeks of leaks, Samsung just announced a couple of new additions to its laptop line. The Galaxy Book Pro and Galaxy Book Pro 360 joined the hardware giant’s wide range of devices toward the high end — offering what can reasonably be categorized as the company’s take on the MacBook Pro.

The Windows machines continue the company’s push to blur some of the productivity lines between its Galaxy PC and mobile offerings, including a number of cross-device software offerings and, naturally, the inclusion of the S-Pen, which ships in the box with the Pro 360. As the name implies, the 360’s lid hinges in either direction, so it can double as a writing surface.

The thin and light design is probably the headline feature for Samsung. The Pro and Pro 360 measure 11.2 and 11.9 millimeters, respectively. Both feature an option of a 13.3 and 15.6-inch Super AMOLEDs. With a 1920 x 1080 resolution. That’s all powered by either a Core i5 or i7 11th-gen Intel processor, 8 or 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage (512GB max on the Pro).

Image Credits: Samsung

There are also options for LTE and 5G versions (depending on market availability). That will almost certainly have a direct impact on the battery, which the company rates as “all-day.” Both models sport 65W fast charging by way of the USB-C port. The keyboard mechanisms have been upgraded over previous models and the track pad is now 23% larger.

The systems go up for preorder today and start shipping May 14. The 13 and 15-inch versions of the Pro start at $1,000 and $1,100, respectively and the 360 runs $1,200 and $1,300.

Extra Crunch members save money with Partner Perks and event discounts

News: Netflix launches its shuffle feature, now called ‘Play Something,’ to users worldwide

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Netflix today is officially launching a feature that will make it easier to find something to watch when you’re stuck browsing and unable to make a decision. The service is introducing a tool called “Play Something” to users worldwide — the final iteration that “shuffle” feature you may have already seen during Netflix’s tests over

Netflix today is officially launching a feature that will make it easier to find something to watch when you’re stuck browsing and unable to make a decision. The service is introducing a tool called “Play Something” to users worldwide — the final iteration that “shuffle” feature you may have already seen during Netflix’s tests over the past year. When selected, Netflix will play another show or movie it thinks you’ll like, based on your interests and prior viewing behavior.

In other words, it won’t play random content, but will instead bring up either a movie or show you’re already watching, a series or movie on your list, an unfinished series or movie you may want to revisit, or a brand new series or film that Netflix’s personalization algorithms suggest.

The feature has been in testing under various names and styles for some time. A year ago, the feature was called Shuffle Play, for example. During its Q4 earnings, Netflix said the shuffle feature would roll out to its worldwide users sometime in the first half of 2021, describing it as a way for users to “instantly watch a title chosen just for them.”

For today’s launch, not much has changed beyond the feature’s name and style.

Image Credits: Netflix

The new option can be found on Netflix’s TV app underneath your profile name, on the navigation menu to the left of your screen and on the tenth row on your Netflix homepage — a location that hopes to find users after they’ve been scrolling for some time without landing on anything they want to watch.

Netflix users with screen-readers can use Text-to-Speech (TTS) to use Play Something, the company notes.

While Netflix is always testing features that make it easier for users to jump from browsing to watching, this feature in particular comes at a time when Netflix is seeing slower subscriber growth — something it’s blaming on the lighter content slate due to COVID. But the reality is that Netflix is no longer the only streamer in town. And some of the content it has shipped has been weak, as evident in the growing list of cancellations. It has also lost top titles like “The Office” to rivals as rights’ holders have pulled their content back to their own new services.