Yearly Archives: 2021

News: Social listening app Earbuds raises $3 million in Series A funding

• August 19, 2021
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Most startup origin stories don’t begin on an NFL field, but that’s where founder, CEO and offensive tackle Jason Fox conceptualized the idea behind Earbuds. As he watched first overall draft pick Cam Newton warm up before a game in 2011, dancing to music, Fox couldn’t help but wonder what the future NFL MVP was

Most startup origin stories don’t begin on an NFL field, but that’s where founder, CEO and offensive tackle Jason Fox conceptualized the idea behind Earbuds. As he watched first overall draft pick Cam Newton warm up before a game in 2011, dancing to music, Fox couldn’t help but wonder what the future NFL MVP was listening to — and he bet that the crowd of 85,000 fans were curious too.

Ten years later, Earbuds has raised a $3 million Series A round for its social listening app, led by Ecliptic Capital with additional investment from the Andre Agassi Foundation and LFG Ventures.

Since its launch in 2019, Earbuds has allowed users — whether they’re famous artists, NFL stars or ordinary people — to share their favorite playlists, livestream music like a DJ and comment on other people’s music picks. Some notable figures on the app include the artist Nelly and professional quarterbacks like Baker Mayfield and Patrick Mahomes, the highest-paid player in the NFL. Mayfield and Mahomes are also investors in the app.

With this recent raise, Fox and his team of six plan to expand the app to add creator monetization tools, incentivizing people to use the app. Plus, Earbuds also announced that it hired two former product and engineering leaders from Apple, David Ransom and Sean Moubry, who joined Earbuds as head of Product and head of Engineering, respectively. Tech veteran Drew Larner also came aboard as a senior advisor and investor — in 2015, he sold the streaming app Rdio to Pandora. Pandora was then sold to Sirius XM for $3.5 billion in 2018.

Image Credits: Earbuds’ interface allows users to search for athlete accounts/Earbuds.

To use Earbuds, users must have a paid account on Spotify or Apple Music. Soon, Fox says, Earbuds should have integrations with paid versions of Amazon Music and Pandora, too. These integrations are how the app, available on both iOS and Android, is able to source music for streaming. But regardless of which platform a listener uses, they can still take advantage of the social features on Earbuds, listening along to live playlists and commenting along with other listeners.

When you connect your account, you’re able to easily import your existing playlists. Then, on the app, you can add voice clips to comment on your song choices. When listening to a stream, users have the option to save the playlist to their streaming service or share it as an Instagram story.

Fox declined to share monthly active user numbers, but expressed confidence that soliciting users from other streaming platforms’ existing subscriber base won’t be a big hurdle for user acquisition; when it comes to paid streaming music subscribers, Spotify has 165 million users, Apple Music has at least 60 million and Amazon music has at least 55 million.

“We want to continue to add additional streaming partners to accommodate everyone. We want to connect with all users regardless of what platform they use,” Fox said.

Image Credits: Earbuds founder and CEO Jason Fox/Earbuds.

Fox wants more musical artists to use the app, but given his background as an NFL player, much of the company’s existing marketing has been targeted toward athletes and sports fans — a particularly interesting potential market for Earbuds is NCAA athletes, who are newly able to monetize their image and likeness. 

“You’ve got the quarterback before the big rivalry game, and they want to be able to monetize the fans while they’re listening to music and getting amped up with them before the game,” Fox explained.

Since these monetization tools haven’t rolled out yet, there’s currently no in-app purchases available on Earbuds. This would give Earbuds, which isn’t yet profitable, another income stream. So far, the app has made money through in-app sponsored posts from partners like the NBA, the NFL playoffs, smart speaker companies and beverage companies.

“We can continue to do that, but we feel like the majority of growth and revenue moving forward will be through partnerships, integrations and supporting the creator economy,” Fox said. Currently, Earbuds has a partnership with Apple Music, so if someone subscribes to the platform via Earbuds, Earbuds gets a cut of their subscription payment.

As streaming services like Spotify grow, social listening apps like Earbuds are emerging too. Spotify itself has rolled out more social listening features lately, including a Music + Talk platform similar to Earbuds’ existing offerings.

News: Fontinalis Partners, the early mobility-focused VC firm backed by Ford, rolls out a third fund

• August 19, 2021
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Fontinalis Partners, a 12-year-old, Detroit-based venture firm that was among the earliest early-stage venture outfits to focus squarely on mobility, has collected $104 million in capital commitments for its third and newest fund. Investors in the vehicle include Ford Motor Corp., whose executive chairman, Bill Ford, cofounded Fontinalis and continues to help manage the fund.

Fontinalis Partners, a 12-year-old, Detroit-based venture firm that was among the earliest early-stage venture outfits to focus squarely on mobility, has collected $104 million in capital commitments for its third and newest fund.

Investors in the vehicle include Ford Motor Corp., whose executive chairman, Bill Ford, cofounded Fontinalis and continues to help manage the fund. It also collected commitments from roughly 30 other limited partners, ranging from corporate partners in the automotive and insurance industries to family offices.

The team’s interpretation of mobility as pertaining to any startup that “enables efficient movement” has resulted in a wide range of bets. Fontinalis had nabbed a stake in Postmates, for example, which was acquired last year in an all-stock deal by Uber. It wrote a check to Lyft,  and helped fund the self-driving startup nuTonomy, which sold to auto supplier Delphi Automotive in 2017 for $450 million.

It has also more recently funded Gatik, a startup developing an autonomous vehicle stack for B2B short-haul logistics; Robust.AI, a startup at work on an industrial-grade cognitive platform for robots; Helm.ai, a maker of driverless car AI; and FreightWaves, a data and content startup that aims to provide participants in the freight wave industry with near-time analytics.

Altogether, the firm has invested in roughly 55 companies, and it says that 20 of them have already seen exits, including the family tracking app Life360, which went public on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2019, and lidar sensor manufacturer Ouster, which became publicly traded in March in the U.S. by merging with a blank-check company.

As for the size of its newest fund — which is roughly the same size as the firm’s $100 million second fund — there’s a reason Fontinalis hasn’t raised a much larger vehicle (no pun intended) unlike other investors who’ve been routinely doubling their fund sizes every couple of years.

As Fontinalis cofounder Chris Cheever and longtime partner Chris Stallman tell it, Fontinalis could be investing more dollars (and making more money in management fees). Instead, their team sees their job as finding the best deals within their mandate, then, after funding those companies, opening up more opportunities for the firm’s limited partners to directly co-invest alongside the firm.

“We have a number of LPs in this fund that have a pretty considerable appetite for co-investment opportunities,” says Stallman,”so there’s a lot of flexibility for us to scale up through them.” Adds Cheever of the network Fontinalis brings to deals, “Many of these parties could be key customers that startups are looking to access, but also simply be their partners.”

Fontinalis now has $270 million in assets under management. Cheever and Stallman say it has already made five investments in Series A-stage or later companies out of its newest fund; it has also written separate checks to six seed-stage companies.

Among its newest bets is an additive manufacturing company that has not publicly disclosed the round yet. It also recently wrote a follow-on check into Highland Electric, a company that’s focused on helping school systems adopt electric buses by helping them up grade their infrastructure, manage their charging, train their drivers and providing them with financing options for the buses.

News: Medical supply marketplace startup bttn. sews up additional $5M seed

• August 19, 2021
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Founders JT Garwood and Jack Miller started Bttn after seeing the challenges medical organizations had during the global pandemic to not only find supplies, but also get fair prices for them.

Coming off a $1.5 million seed round in June, bttn. announced Thursday that it secured another $5 million extension, led by FUSE, to the round to give it a $26.5 million post-money valuation.

The Seattle-based company was founded in March 2021 by JT Garwood and Jack Miller after seeing the challenges medical organizations had during the global pandemic to not only find supplies, but also get fair prices for them.

“We went into this building on the pain points customers had dealing with a system that is so archaic and outdated — most were still faxing in order forms and keeping closets full of supplies, but not knowing what was there,” Garwood, CEO, told TechCrunch.

Bttn. is going after the U.S. wholesale medical supply market, which is predicted to be valued at $243.3 billion by the end of 2021, according to IBISWorld. The company created a business-to-business e-commerce platform with a variety of high-quality medical supplies, saving customers an average of between 20% and 40%, while providing a better ordering and shipping experience, Garwood said.

It now boasts more than 300 customers, including individual practices and surgical centers, and multiple government contracts. It is also currently the preferred supplier for over 17 healthcare associations across the country, Garwood said. In addition to expanding into dental supplies, bttn. is also attracting customers like senior living facilities and home and hospice care.

Garwood intends to use the funds to expand bttn.’s technology, sales and operations teams, and increase its partnerships. The company is also adding new features like a portal to track shipments more easily, better order automation and improve the ability to control when supplies will get to them.

Bttn. is also analyzing more of the data coming in from its marketplace to recognize where the trends are coming from, including hospitalization rates, to share with customers. For example, if hospitals are overcrowded, supply shortages will follow, Garwood said.

“The medical supply industry was built on inequity, and we have a sense of duty to build a product that enables a better future for our customers,” he added. “We can proactively let customers know that spikes are expected, provide them with correct information and give that power back to the consumers and healthcare providers in ways they never had before.”

Whereas bttn.’s first seed round was “about pouring gas on the fire,” partnering with FUSE this time around was an easy decision for Garwood, who said the firm is bringing new assets to the table.

Brendan Wales, general partner at FUSE, said via email that his firm backs promising entrepreneurs building businesses in the Pacific Northwest and discovered bttn. before they announced any funding.

He said there is massive consumerization of healthcare, most evident on the patient side for years, but now becoming so on the provider side. Medical office employees are looking for the same type of customer experience they get from online businesses they frequently shop at, and bttn. “has a relentless drive to provide the same type of experiences and interactions to health providers.”

“We fell in love with the idea of providing a transparent and delightful customer experience to health providers, something that has been sorely lacking,” Wales added. “That, tied in with a young and ambitious team, made it so that our entire partnership worked tirelessly to partner with them.”

News: Launch House raises millions to launch houses (and the next big startups)

• August 19, 2021
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In May 2020, a trio of friends rented a home in Tulum, Mexico and invited their internet friends. The project was dubbed The Launch House, and the 18 entrepreneurs who came to live there had to do the following: pay rent, launch projects, and build their company in public. Other homes began popping across the

In May 2020, a trio of friends rented a home in Tulum, Mexico and invited their internet friends. The project was dubbed The Launch House, and the 18 entrepreneurs who came to live there had to do the following: pay rent, launch projects, and build their company in public. Other homes began popping across the world around the same time, as a nod to old school hacker homes but built for the remote work era of the coronavirus.

Over a year later, Launch House has expanded its physical and digital presence beyond a one-off project. The trio – Michael Houck, Brett Goldstein and Jacob Peters – announced that they’ve raised $3 million to expand their residency program, physically and digitally. Next fall, Launch House will launch LA and NYC-specific programs, as well as residencies built to gather people within Web 3.0, fintech, B2B enterprise, and the creator economy.

The seed round was led by Flybridge Capital Partners, with participation from Day One Ventures and Graph Ventures. More than 100 angel investors also put money into the company as well, including 60 early Launch House members and notable techies including Alexia Bonatsos, Balaji Srinivasan and Mike Duboe.

Tulum to now

Since its Tulum origins, Launch House has grown to focus on a more cohort-based approach. Entrepreneurs are invited to take up a 4-week, live-in residency at Paris Hilton’s former Beverly Hills Mansion, which the company has rented out. To date, over 200 people across 8 cohorts have gone through the Launch House to bring their ideas to the seed stage.

Here’s where it goes beyond the traditional hacker home. The in-person residencies are viewed as on-boarding events into the broader Launch House community, which includes digital and physical events, services that help with scaling startups, and in-house social networks. Houck, a former product manager at Airbnb, is working on a service that allows Launch House community members to invite other members to stay at their homes for residency.

While the company’s next chapter, dubbed Season 2 will include new sector-based houses in New York and Los Angeles, the team stressed a bigger focus on digital spaces. While describing the transition of offline communities into online ones, Goldstein gave the metaphor of religion.

“There are tons of important religious sites in the world, like Mecca and The Wailing Wall, but you can be a good member of that religion without going to those places – and actually, most people don’t,” he said. The co-founder thinks the same can be said of Launch House participants, who maybe never step foot in a home but are active members of the community virtually.

“We see ourselves less as a hacker home and more as a venture-scaled membership community,” Goldstein said. “These physical [spaces] are just an initial wedge to drive deep connections.” The company’s bet, therefore, is that it can help spin out enough successful startups that its name has the signal of a prestigious program – and thus get more members as its brand grows.

While most startups are at the early stage, some have begun to break out and go on to raise from Y Combinator, Sequoia, Village Global, and even Beyonce and Jay Z. Startups formed at the house include Showtime, Compose, Colabra, while others like Wombo and TagMango hit milestones and fundraising goals while participating in the home.

Unlike other early-stage accelerators like Y Combinator, Launch House doesn’t take equity in any of the startups that launch out of their community.

“Great founders have tons of options, and we think that in order to get people into your community you can’t demand equity upfront,” Goldstein said. “It’s kind of an antiquated model.” Instead, Launch House makes money through a membership-fee model. Live-in members are given a one year free membership to the community with residency costs, and then after that it is an annual subscription.

‘10X better’ than WeWork

The startup’s scale could be somewhat curbed if it only can grow through physical spaces, which is part of the reason it may be beginning to focus more on the digital world. WeWork, for example, gave many lessons, one of which was about how hard a business flexible office space truly is.

As for if the infamous real estate company tarnished investor interest in entrepreneur hubs, Peters pointed to Launch House’s lead investor in today’s round: Jesse Middleton of Flybridge Ventures. Middleton formerly built WeWork Labs, which the co-founders say give them a direct perspective on how to build in a “10X better” way than the nearly public company.

The other challenge for Launch House will be curating a diverse group of engaged community members, a struggle that every online community goes through.

The residency’s application process currently evaluates members on three categories: how exciting a person is as a founder, how exciting their company is, and how much benefit they would get from joining this community right now, which can range from stage of company to who else is in the cohort that month. Once the Launch House team goes through the cohort, a pool of 50 Launch House community members work as volunteers to interview the potential members. Finally, the co-founders do a final check before sending out offers.

Launch House co-founders

It’s an intensive process that, if not done intentionally, could limit who gets access to the Launch House by rewarding those who lean into each other’s echo-chambers. Launch House said that it has had cohorts in the past with 40% underrepresented founders, but that its current cohort is approximately 25% POC.

As the company grows its member base, it will have new pressures to deal with around diversity and making sure its customers are seeing themselves represented in the homes. Houck explained that the company recently put together a Diversity Council that meets every few months to discuss new initiatives, which include creating a scholarship program to help candidates from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds afford the program. The program has dispersed $20,000 in 2 months. The company has also hired someone to form partnerships with underrepresented founder communities.

Launch House has raised money during a time where many of its potential customers are rethinking the work day, and life, they want. With fresh plans to expand, the startup has the opportunity to intentionally build a network that wouldn’t have existed in Silicon Valley before the pandemic – and will have ripple effects long after.

News: Facebook finally made a good virtual reality app

• August 19, 2021
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Facebook’s journey toward making virtual reality a thing has been long and circuitous, but despite mixed success in finding a wide audience for VR, they have managed to build some very nice hardware along the way. What’s fairly ironic is that while Facebook has managed to succeed in finessing the hardware and operating system of

Facebook’s journey toward making virtual reality a thing has been long and circuitous, but despite mixed success in finding a wide audience for VR, they have managed to build some very nice hardware along the way. What’s fairly ironic is that while Facebook has managed to succeed in finessing the hardware and operating system of its Oculus devices — things it had never done before — over the years it has struggled most with actually making a good app for VR.

The company has released a number of social VR apps over the years, and while each of them managed to do something right, none of them did anything quite well enough to stave off a shutdown. Setting aside the fact that most VR users don’t have a ton of other friends that also own VR headsets, the broadest issue plaguing these social apps was that they never really gave users a great reason to use them. While watching 360-videos or playing board games with friends were interesting gimmicks, it’s taken the company an awful lot of time to understand that a dedicated ”social” app doesn’t make much sense in VR and that users haven’t been looking for a standalone social app, so much as they’ve been looking for engaging experiences that were improved by social dynamics.

This all brings me to what Facebook showed me a demo of this week — a workplace app called Horizon Workrooms which is launching in open beta for Quest 2 users starting today.

The app seems to be geared towards providing work-from-home employees a virtual reality sphere to collaborate inside. Users can link their Mac or PC to Workrooms and livestream their desktop to the app while the Quest 2’s passthrough cameras allow users to type on their physical keyboard. Users can chat with one another as avatars and share photos and files or draw on a virtual whiteboard. It’s an app that would have made a more significant splash for the Quest 2 platform had it launched earlier in the pandemic, though it’s tackling an issue that still looms large among tech savvy offices — finding tech solutions to aid meaningful collaboration in a remote environment.

Horizon Workrooms isn’t a social app per se but the way it approaches social communication in VR is more thoughtful than any other first-party social VR app that Facebook has shipped. The spatial elements are less overt and gimmicky than most VR apps and simply add to an already great functional experience that, at times, felt more productive and engaging than a normal video call.

It all plays into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent proclamation that Facebook is transitioning into becoming a “metaverse company.”

Now, what’s the metaverse? In Zuckerberg’s own words, “It’s a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces. You can kind of think of this as an embodied internet that you’re inside of rather than just looking at.” This certainly sounds like a fairly significant recalibration for Facebook, which has generally approached AR/VR as a wholly separate entity from its suite of mobile apps. Desktop users and VR users have been effectively siloed from each other over the years.

Generally, Facebook has been scaling Oculus like they’re building the next smartphone, building its headsets with a native app paradigm at their core. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s future-minded “metaverse” sounds much more like what Roblox has been building towards than anything Facebook has actually shipped. Horizon Workrooms is living under the Horizon brand which seems to be where Facebook’s future metaverse play is rooted. The VR social platform is interestingly still in closed beta after being announced nearly two years ago. If Facebook can ever see Horizon’s vision to fruition, it could grow to become a Roblox-like hub of user-created games, activities and groups that replaces the native app mobile dynamics with a more fluid social experience.

The polish of Workrooms is certainly a promising sign of where Facebook could be moving.

News: RepairSmith raises $42M Series B to bring auto repair to customers’ doorsteps

• August 19, 2021
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Needing to get your car fixed is like having a toothache: It’s painful, hard to ignore and likely means someone messing around under the hood. RepairSmith, launched in 2019, wants to make that process a little smoother through its mobile auto repair service that sends a mechanic right to the driver’s home. The startup is

Needing to get your car fixed is like having a toothache: It’s painful, hard to ignore and likely means someone messing around under the hood. RepairSmith, launched in 2019, wants to make that process a little smoother through its mobile auto repair service that sends a mechanic right to the driver’s home.

The startup is already in seven states and now, with a new round of $42 million funding, is looking to grow its operations to encompass every major metropolitan area in the U.S. by the end of 2022.

“Fundamentally what we’re doing here is e-commerce plus logistics,” Milne said. “We’re trying to disrupt probably the biggest retail industry that’s untouched by tech.” RepairSmith aims to do so by letting customers book an appointment online and have a mechanic perform an inspection or repair from their driveway, a far cry from the conventional auto repair process.

RepairSmith was incepted at Mercedes-Benz’ incubator program, and the company’s first few funding rounds were furnished solely by the automaker. Now that RepairSmith has a solid footing in multiple metros, with the data to show it’s an attractive business, the company decided to bring in new investors TI Capital, Porsche Ventures and Spring Mountain Capital to the latest Series B, in addition to Mercedes.

“We built this business from the beginning to be multibrand as an industry solution,” RepairSmith CEO Joel Milne told TechCrunch in an interview. “While [Mercedes] seeded it, it was never meant to be a Mercedes solution. That was always the intent.”

Depending on the market, users can have a repair technician at their home in as little as one or two days. Milne said around 90% of appointments can be completed on-site. For those remaining 10% or so, the customer can either drive their car (or if it’s not drivable) have it towed to a network of auto body shops that have partnered with RepairSmith.

In some cases, the customer knows what is wrong with their car in advance, but when they don’t, RepairSmith schedules an inspection visit and generates a quote for the service after.

The company launched focusing on the consumer market, but it’s also expanded to working with fleets, rental car agencies and dealerships. A little over a quarter of the company’s services are now B2B. “They’re both equally big markets and very attractive opportunities for us,” Milne said. “It’s really a function of, we focused on consumer first, but part of this capital raise [is] we’re aggressively growing out our B2B services.”

All RepairSmith technicians are also employees, rather than contractors, a decision that ultimately came down to wanting to attract top talent.

“We didn’t feel that we could be competitive in recruiting the quality of technicians we were looking for, not giving them standard employment terms. All technicians at repair shops are employees today, and that’s the market that we compete in for labor,” Milne said. He added that the company also didn’t want to have to deal with legal issues over what counts as a contractor versus employee.

The startup has big goals — entering all major metro markets by the end of next year, which doesn’t just include hiring more auto technicians but also continuing to improve the company’s software and logistics platform, which it built from the ground up. Milne demurred on whether it might need additional capital to get there. “Ultimately, if the market is good, we’ll be looking for further investment to grow, whether it’s internationally, whether it’s to grow our service offering. But this raise gets us a long way on the way there, depending on how fast we want to go.”

News: Amazon rolls out India’s first celebrity voice on Alexa with Amitabh Bachchan

• August 19, 2021
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Amazon has rolled out India’s first celebrity voice feature on Alexa with the nation’s biggest movie star Amitabh Bachchan as the company makes a push to lure more users in the world’s second-most populated nation. The company, which rolled out the voice of Samuel Jackson on Alexa in the U.S. in 2019, said users in

Amazon has rolled out India’s first celebrity voice feature on Alexa with the nation’s biggest movie star Amitabh Bachchan as the company makes a push to lure more users in the world’s second-most populated nation.

The company, which rolled out the voice of Samuel Jackson on Alexa in the U.S. in 2019, said users in India can add the Bollywood legend’s voice to their Echo devices (starting today) or Amazon shopping app (in a few weeks) for an introductory price of 149 Indian rupees ($2) for the first year. (Starting second year, the annual price will move to $4.)

The 78-year-old actor is providing Amazon with stories from his life, a selection of poems from his father, tongue twisters, and motivational quotes. Amazon customers can also ask Alexa to play music, set alarms, get weather updates and get answers in Bachchan’s signature style.

And the company said it is also applying neural speech technology to make Alexa sound like Bachchan even if there’s no direct pre-recording. (Amit ji, remind me to ask you about Amazon’s antitrust situation in India later today.)

Image credits: Amazon

“Working with Amazon to introduce my voice on Alexa was a new experience in bringing together the magic of voice technology and artistic creativity. I am excited that my well-wishers can now interact with me via this new medium, and looking forward to hear how they feel about this,” said Bachchan in a statement.

A household name, Bachchan emerged as Bollywood’s top star in the 1970s playing characters who battled corruption and social injustice. He has also done scores of advertisements for brands and initiatives from everything including hair oil, biscuits, cold drinks, jewelry, state tourism, banks to UNICEF-backed polio vaccination campaign.

The company announced its collaboration with Bollywood legend last year. But the pandemic forced Amazon’s engineering teams to work remotely for this project. There were also additional complications. Globally, users can trigger Alexa with one-word wake alert. Alexa, do this, for instance. But in case of Bachchan, Amazon has introduce a two-word wake system to Alexa. “Amit ji.” (Where ‘ji’ is a Hindi word to pay respect.)

“At Amazon & Alexa, we consistently innovate on behalf of our customers and building the Amitabh Bachchan celebrity voice experience with one of India’s most iconic voices has been a labor of love. Creating the world’s first bi-lingual celebrity voice required us to invent & re-invent across almost every element of speech science – wake word, speech recognition, neural text-to-speech and more,” said Puneesh Kumar, Country Leader for Alexa, Amazon India, in a statement.

“While we are proud of the many India-first innovations and desi-delighters in this, it’s still Day 1 and we will continue to enrich this experience as science evolves.”

India is a key overseas market for Amazon, which has deployed over $6.5 billion and is increasingly making investment in startups. This isn’t the first time the company has signed up Bachchan for one of its businesses. The company last year acquired Bachchan’s “Gulabo Sitabo” movie rights for streaming globally on Prime Video.

News: Apple is changing Mail Privacy Protection and email marketers must prepare

• August 18, 2021
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Effectively leveraging email analytics and data to inform future emails and multichannel campaigns requires marketers to start preparing now.

The most critical phase in a marketing team’s mix and overall multichannel strategy happens after you press send on an email campaign: the post-send and performance pillars of email marketing.

During this phase, marketers should gather metrics and data to guide insights impacting future emails and entire marketing campaigns. Email metrics can influence ad messaging and social posts and guide the design, content and product marketing teams. When used strategically, these metrics increase email programs’ ROI while raising marketing channel and workflow efficiency and effectiveness.

As one of the most lucrative channels for reaching target audiences — for every dollar invested in email marketing, brands receive $36 in return — email enables brands to reach their core consumer base: email subscribers.

They have opted-in to email touch points because they want to hear from the brand. By applying these insights via analytics, marketers optimize marketing spend and messaging to hit business goals.

Email impacts marketing strategy and enables better overall business success. It’s the lifeblood of an effective multichannel campaign. However, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection — announced earlier this summer with its iOS 15 update — attempts to eliminate metrics and data associated with email.

According to the Litmus Email Client Market Share, in 2020, Apple iPhone, Apple Mail and Apple iPad accounted for nearly half of all email opens. Lacking these insights will create marketing roadblocks for segmented and personalized touch points. Marketers and businesses must prepare by adjusting email strategy and processes before the update occurs.

Companies and consumers have talked about privacy quite a bit lately. Companies fearing breaches, reputation damage and potentially lost revenue want to protect consumer data. Consumer awareness of privacy concerns has grown, too.

In a 2021 survey, over half the respondents expressed more concern about online privacy than in 2020. Consumers expect brands to demonstrate trustworthiness before they willingly share sensitive personal information.

Recognizing an increased desire for better privacy control, Apple revealed new privacy protections in its iOS 15 update, including its Mail Privacy Protection. Apple Mail users may hide their IP addresses, locations and additional data from senders, preventing brands from pulling information like open rates and location. Apple said that “Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user.”

What does this update mean for marketers? The potential disappearance of a critical phase in the marketing mix and multichannel strategy: the post-send and performance pillars of email marketing. No open-rate-specific data — the brand will appear to have a 100% open rate.

News: Facebook releases a glimpse of its most popular posts, but we don’t learn much

• August 18, 2021
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Facebook is out with a new report collecting the most popular posts on the platform, responding to critics who believe the company is deliberately opaque about its top performing content. Facebook’s new “widely viewed content reports” will come out quarterly, reflecting most viewed top News Feed posts in the U.S. every three months — not

Facebook is out with a new report collecting the most popular posts on the platform, responding to critics who believe the company is deliberately opaque about its top performing content.

Facebook’s new “widely viewed content reports” will come out quarterly, reflecting most viewed top News Feed posts in the U.S. every three months — not exactly the kind of realtime data monitoring that might prove useful for observing emerging trends.

With the new data set, Facebook hopes to push back against criticism that its algorithms operate within a black box. But like its often misleading blogged rebuttals and the other sets of cherry-picked data it shares, the company’s latest gesture at transparency is better than nothing, but not particularly useful.

So what do we learn? According to the new data set, 87 percent of posts that people viewed in the U.S. during Q2 of this year didn’t include an outside link. That’s notable but not very telling since Facebook still has an incredibly massive swath of people sharing and seeing links on a daily basis.

YouTube is predictably the top domain by Facebook’s chosen metric of “content viewers,” which it defines as any account that saw a piece of content on the News Feed, though we don’t get anything in the way of potentially helpful granular data there. Amazon, Gofundme, TikTok and others also in the top ten, no surprises there either.

Things get weirder when Facebook starts breaking down its most viewed links. The top five links include a website for alumni of the Green Bay Packers football team, a random online CBD marketplace and reppnforchrist.com, an apparently prominent portal for Christianity-themed graphic t-shirts. The subscription page for the Epoch Times, a site well-known for spreading pro-Trump conspiracies and other disinformation, comes in at number ten, though it was beaten by a Tumblr link to two cats walking with their tails intertwined.

Yahoo and ABC News are the only prominent national media outlets that make the top 20 when the data is sliced and diced in this particular way. Facebook also breaks down which posts the most people viewed during the period with a list of mostly benign if odd memes, including one that reads “If your VAGINA [cat emoji] or PENIS [eggplant emoji] was named after the last TV show/Move u watched what would it be.”

If you’re wondering why Facebook chose to collect and present this set of data in this specific way, it’s because the company is desperately trying to prove a point: that its platform isn’t overrun by the political conspiracies and controversial right-wing personalities that make headlines.

The dataset is Facebook’s latest argument in its long feud with New York Times reporter Kevin Roose, who created a Twitter account that surfaces Facebook’s most engaging posts on a daily basis, as measured through the Facebook-owned social monitoring tool CrowdTangle.

By the metric of engagement, Facebook’s list of top performing posts in the U.S. are regularly dominated by far-right personalities and sites like Newsmax, which pushes election conspiracies that Facebook would prefer to distance itself from.

The company argues that Facebook posts with the most interactions don’t accurately represent the top content on the platform. Facebook insists that reach data, which measures how many people see a given post, is a superior metric, but there’s no reason that engagement data isn’t just as relevant if not more so.

“The content that’s seen by the most people isn’t necessarily the content that also gets the most engagement,” Facebook wrote, in a dig clearly aimed at Roose.

The platform wants to de-emphasize political content across the board, which isn’t surprising given its track record of amplifying Russian disinformation, violent far-right militias and the Stop the Steal movement, which culminated in deadly violence at the U.S. Capitol in January.

As The New York Times previously reported, Facebook actually scrapped plans to make its reach data widely available through a public dashboard over fears that even that version of its top performing posts wouldn’t reflect well on the company.

Instead, the company opted to offer a taste of that data in a quarterly report and the result shows plenty of junk content, but less in the way of politics. Facebook’s cursory gesture of transparency notwithstanding, it’s worth remembering that nothing is stopping the company from letting people see a leaderboard of its most popular content at any given time — in realtime even! — beyond the its own fear of bad press.

News: The hottest fintech market you aren’t paying attention to

• August 18, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Tage Kene-Okafor on the show to chat about the burgeoning African startup scene. Tage has become TechCrunch’s key correspondent in the area, chronicling the continent’s expanding venture capital totals,

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Tage Kene-Okafor on the show to chat about the burgeoning African startup scene. Tage has become TechCrunch’s key correspondent in the area, chronicling the continent’s expanding venture capital totals, public company performance and startup ecosystem.

Given that we’ve paid attention to just how much money African startups are raising, we wanted to have Tage on to give us a better, deeper understanding of the continent’s technology activity. Here’s what we got into:

• The power of Y Combinator in Africa: Is the well-known American accelerator a kingmaker in Africa? Or are we merely seeing more of its activity thanks to our own information biases?
• Fintech as core focus: As in many markets, fintech investment and startup activity stand out in Africa. We wanted to better understand why that’s the case in Africa, and what startups are building in the realm of financial technology.
• African e-commerce: The continent’s e-commerce market is perhaps best known through the lens of Jumia, a public tech company that works in the sale of goods online, and their delivery. How quickly is e-commerce growing in Africa, and which startups could be the next breakouts? We asked Tage.

Equity is back on Friday with our weekly news roundup!