Tag Archives: Blog

News: Gettr, the latest pro-Trump social network, is already a mess

• July 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Well, that was fast. Just days after a Twitter clone from former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller launched, the new social network is already beset by problems. For one, hackers quickly leveraged Gettr’s API to scrape the email addresses of more than 85,000 of its users. User names, names and birthdays were also part of the

Well, that was fast. Just days after a Twitter clone from former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller launched, the new social network is already beset by problems.

For one, hackers quickly leveraged Gettr’s API to scrape the email addresses of more than 85,000 of its users. User names, names and birthdays were also part of the scraped data set, which was surfaced by Alon Gal, co-founder of cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock.

“When threat actors are able to extract sensitive information due to neglectful API implementations, the consequence is equivalent to a data breach and should be handled accordingly by the firm [and] examined by regulators,” Gal told TechCrunch.

Last week, TechCrunch’s own Zack Whittaker predicted that Gettr would soon see its data scraped through its API.

The scraped data is just one of Gettr’s headaches. The app actually went live in the App Store and Google Play last month but left beta on July 4 following a launch post in Politico. While the app is meant to appeal to the famously anti-China Trump sphere, Gettr apparently received early funding from Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, an ally of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Earlier this year, The Washington Post reported that Guo is at the center of a massive online disinformation network that spreads anti-vaccine claims and QAnon conspiracies.

On July 2, the app’s team apologized for signup delays citing a spike in downloads, but a bit of launch downtime is probably the least of its problems. Over the weekend, a number of official Gettr accounts including Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Steve Bannon, and Miller’s own were compromised, raising more questions about the app’s shoddy security practices.

That incident aside, fake accounts overwhelm any attempt to find verified users on Gettr. That goes for the app’s own recommendations too: a fake brand account for Steam was among the app’s own recommendations during TechCrunch’s testing.

Another red flag: The app’s design is conspicuously identical to Twitter and appears to have used the company’s API to copy some users’ follower counts and profiles. Gettr encourages new users to use their Twitter handle in the sign up process, saying that it will allow tweets to be copied over in some cases (we signed up, but this didn’t work for us). TechCrunch reached out to Twitter about Gettr’s striking similarities and the use of its API but the company declined to comment.

On mobile, Gettr is basically an exact clone of Twitter — albeit one that’s very rough around the edges. Some of Gettr’s copy is stilted and strange, including the boast that it’s a “non-bias” social network that “tried the best to provide best software quality to the users, allow anyone to express their opinion freely.”

The company is positioning itself as an alternative for anyone who believes that mainstream social networks are hostile to far right ideas. Gettr’s website beckons new users with familiar Trumpian messaging: “Don’t be Cancelled. Flex Your 1st Amendment. Celebrate Freedom.”

“Hydroxycholoroquine works!” Miller shared (Gettr’d?) over the weekend, quoting the former president. “And nobody is going to take down this post or suspend this account! #GETTR.” So far on Gettr, content moderation is either lax or nonexistent. But as we’ve seen with Parler and other havens for sometimes violent conspiracies, that approach can only last so long.

In spite of being widely associated with Trump through Miller and former Trump campaign staffer Tim Murtaugh, the former president doesn’t yet have a presence on the app. Some figures from Trump’s orbit have established profiles on Gettr, including Steve Bannon (84.7K followers) and Mike Pompeo (1.3M followers), but a search for Trump only brings up unofficial accounts. Bloomberg reported that Trump has no plans to join the app. (Given Gettr’s preponderance of Sonic the Hedgehog porn, we can’t exactly blame him.)

The online pro-Trump ecosystem remains scattered in mid-2021. With Trump banned and the roiling conspiracy network around QAnon no longer welcome on Facebook and Twitter, Gettr positioned itself as a refuge for mainstream social media’s many outcasts. But given Gettr’s mounting early woes, the sketchy Twitter clone’s moment in the sun might already be coming to an end.

News: Sarah Guo, Kobie Fuller & Casey Aylward headline investor panel at TC Sessions: SaaS

• July 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

While SaaS has become the default way to deliver software in 2021, it still takes a keen eye to find the companies that will grow into successful businesses, maybe even more so with so much competition. That’s why we’re bringing together three investors to discuss what they look for when they invest in SaaS startups.

While SaaS has become the default way to deliver software in 2021, it still takes a keen eye to find the companies that will grow into successful businesses, maybe even more so with so much competition. That’s why we’re bringing together three investors to discuss what they look for when they invest in SaaS startups.

For starters, we’ll have Sarah Guo, who has been a partner at Greylock since 2013 where she concentrates on AI, cybersecurity, infrastructure and the future of work — all in a SaaS context of course. Among her investments are Obsidian, Clubhouse and Awake. Her exits include Demisto, which Palo Alto acquired for $560 million in 2019 and Skyhigh Networks, which McAfee bought for $400 million in 2018.

Prior to joining Greylock, she worked for Goldman Sachs investing in growth-stage companies and advising SaaS companies like Dropbox and Workday.

Next we’ll have Kobie Fuller, a partner at Upfront Ventures, who looks at SaaS as well as AR and VR. Fuller has been at Upfront since 2016 when he joined after a three-year stint at Accel. He oversaw a pair of billion dollar exits while at Accel including ExactTarget to Salesforce for $2.5 billion and Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion. Upfront investments include Bevy, community building software, which recently got a $40 million investment with 20% of that coming from 25 Black investors.

Finally, we’ll have Casey Aylward, a principal at Costanoa Ventures where she concentrates on early-stage enterprise startups. Among her investments have been Aserto, Bigeye and Cyral. She tends to concentrate on developer tools. “My entire career so far has been focused on developers: whether it was building tools for developers, building software myself or now investing in enabling technologies for the next generation of technical users,” she wrote on her bio page.

This prestigious group will share their thoughts at TC Sessions: SaaS, a one-day virtual event that will examine the state of SaaS to help startup founders, developers and investors understand the state of play and what’s next. We hope you’ll join us.

The single-day event will take place 100% virtually on October 27 and will feature actionable advice, Q&A with some of SaaS’s biggest names and plenty of networking opportunities. Importantly, $75 Early Bird passes are now on sale. Book your passes today to save $100 before prices go up.

News: To stay ahead of your competitors, start building your narrative on day one

• July 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

How do you stay ahead of your competition when you know it’s only a matter of time before they copy your best features? The solution is messaging, says conversion optimization expert Peep Laja.

Having a unique product used to give you at least a few months of lead time over other players, but that advantage seems to matter less and less — just think of how Twitter Spaces managed to land on Android ahead of Clubhouse.

In this context, how do you stay ahead of your competition when you know it’s only a matter of time before they copy your best features?

The solution is messaging, says conversion optimization expert Peep Laja. Unlike features that can be copied and commoditized, a strategic narrative can be a long-term advantage. In the interview below, he explains why and how startups should work on this from their very early days.

(TechCrunch is asking founders who have worked with growth marketers to share a recommendation in this survey. We’ll use your answers to find more experts to interview.)

Laja is the founder of several marketing and optimization businesses: CXL, Speero and Wynter. In a recent Twitter thread, he highlighted common stories and narratives that startups can use, such as “challenging the way things have always been done” or “irreverence,” and came up with examples of companies that employ these tactics. We asked him to expand on some of his thoughts and recommendations for startup founders.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Your site’s tagline tells startups that “product-based differentiation is going away” and that they should “win on messaging.” Can you explain the rationale behind this?

David Cancel, the CEO of Drift, said that famously in 2017.

Broadly speaking, any startup is competing on innovation or messaging, and, ideally, on both. Usually, you want to start with innovation — do something new or something better. However, competing on features is a transient advantage. Doing what no one else is doing won’t last: Sooner or later, you’ll get copied by big players or other startups, so innovation is not enough. Features are a transient advantage that lasts maybe two years, but rarely more. Meanwhile, having the right narrative and messaging can give you a long-lasting advantage.

Startups competing on story have a big advantage if they are bold because big companies optimize for being safe, and that often means being very boring, but nobody will call them out for it. In contrast, startups can be brave and polarizing on purpose.

Ideally, you start with innovation, and at the same time start building your brand as well. Once the competition achieves feature parity, you make people choose you because of the brand. It’s hard to be sustainably objectively better than others, but you definitely cannot be objectively worse.

You help startups do research to find and validate their strategic narrative. Can you explain this concept?

As startups get bigger, they realize that they need to communicate less on features and more on story. Their narrative needs to be connected to a bigger concept and be a strategic narrative. “The world used to be like this, but it changed, and our startup will help you in this new context.”

A fictional example would be selling a course of AI for marketers; ideally, instead of talking about AI, you’d lead with a story, explaining that AI and machine learning are an unstoppable thing that is going to change everything. The future is already here, but not evenly distributed yet. There is no stopping this train. You can get on it, or get left behind. Companies that adopt AI will overtake others, and marketers need to learn AI to adapt. This would make the product way more attractive … than selling it through features: “AI for marketers course. Seven hours of video. Top lecturers.”

This is also what I am doing with my company, Wynter. If you look at SaaS, there are 53 times more companies than 10 years ago, with hundreds of tools available in any given category — think of email marketing, for instance. And a striking thing about competitors in each category is sameness: They pretty much offer the same features. In other words, differentiation based on features doesn’t work anymore. Most companies also look the same and say the same things. Sameness is the default for most companies today. Sameness is the combined effect of companies being too similar in their offers, poorly differentiated in their branding, and indistinct in their communication. You’d think that companies would be all about differentiation these days. Curiously, the opposite is true.

Given that feature-based differentiation is a fleeting advantage, companies should compete on brand. That’s the new world we are in, and in order to win, you need to know what your audience wants and how what you’re telling your audience is landing on them. … This is what my company does, and that’s how I pitch it. As you can see, it follows the narrative I described earlier: showing how the world has changed, and explaining that what used to work is no longer adapted to the new reality that is starting to emerge.

How would you recommend founders anchor their startup to success cases?

Bring your best proof that the world has changed — with data to back you up — and then make a case that winning requires a new strategy. Then show winners and losers based on the strategy they have been using, and use it as new proof that it is best suited for this new world. For instance, if you are pitching product-led growth, you can give examples showing that it is working as a go-to-market strategy because we live in a new world where customers want to start using the product right away. You can give examples showing how this is working, and tie your startup to them.

For other examples, you could also look at what HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah does with community-led growth.

There’s also this startup shipping hardware to remote workers, Firstbase. The Twitter timeline of its CEO, Chris Herd, is a good example of what I am saying: Just look at how he is selling the narrative, not his company.

So first and foremost you sell a narrative, a point of view on the world. And only much later you explain how your company helps their customer win using this new strategy. The narrative is the context for the features, etc.

How can startups avoid getting it wrong?

Your narrative can miss the mark if it’s not about change in the external world and only internal to the company, or if you are investing in a change that is not happening that you are failing to make sound credible. To win on brand, you need to measure the effectiveness of your narrative.

How do you test that? If you do direct sales, getting feedback is pretty straightforward. In my sales demo, I talk about the narrative before going into the demo. If people ask for a copy of my deck, I know it’s hitting home. I also ask for feedback, observe if people are nodding, etc. If you are not going through this sales process — for instance, if you are doing product-led growth — you need to do message testing. This can be one-on-one or as a qualitative survey, but either way, you need to make sure that you are testing on your actual target audience.

We do that at Wynter — you can conduct message testing as well as for customer research, so you can survey people not just on your message, but also on their perception of the world. This helps you discover what in your sales pitch on your website is hitting home, what falls flat, how it compares to the competition and so on.

Have you worked with a talented individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?

Respond to our survey and help us find the best startup growth marketers!

When should startups start working on their messaging?

Companies should attach themselves to a narrative from day one because innovation is transient. Staying ahead of your competition through innovation forever is very rare. Winning on brand is more accessible. So before you have product-market fit, you need message-market fit. Potential customers will look at this. It can even be a moat: Instead of positioning yourself as a commodity (when you sell yourself through non-innovative features, you’re a commodity), you develop a story that people emotionally connect to. You’ll know it’s a moat if it makes it possible for you to charge more than your competitors. This doesn’t happen with a feature: It eventually becomes commoditized and expected. This is much less of a problem when you have a brand.

How should the narrative evolve over time, if at all?

Your narrative also needs to evolve as the world evolves; you always need to be scanning for what’s happening and the broader context. The rise of remote is an example of that; see, for instance, how HR company Lattice attached itself to it as it expanded from one feature to a broader offering.

This connects to a broader point, which is that we are going from mass market to smaller clusters. For example, we all used to watch the same shows, versus all the niche content that has emerged today. This can be good for startups because in most cases, they wouldn’t be able to afford to aim for mass-market appeal from the start anyway. But as they grow, their narrative may have to evolve. And there can also be a brand narrative and a strategic narrative at the same time, with the latter being the one that evolves over time.

In terms of stories, some of the ones I mentioned in my Twitter thread are more timeless, but even some of these might not work forever. For instance, the “David versus Goliath” story might not sound authentic once you reach a certain stage. I also gave the example of Wise “standing up for the people” and focusing on disrupting bank fees, but now that it is getting disrupted itself, it might have to change its narrative. Some companies don’t need to move away from their original narrative, but some do.

News: Yandex Self-Driving Group partners with GrubHub to bring robotic delivery to college campuses

• July 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Yandex Self-Driving Group, a unit of Yandex, the publicly-traded Russian tech giant, has announced a partnership with food delivery service GrubHub to be its multi-year robotic delivery provider across American college campuses. Yandex hopes to reach over 250 campuses over the course of this partnership, beginning with dozens of robots in the fall, according to

Yandex Self-Driving Group, a unit of Yandex, the publicly-traded Russian tech giant, has announced a partnership with food delivery service GrubHub to be its multi-year robotic delivery provider across American college campuses. Yandex hopes to reach over 250 campuses over the course of this partnership, beginning with dozens of robots in the fall, according to a statement from Yandex Self-Driving CEO Dmitry Polishchuk.

Last September, Yandex’s self-driving unit spun out from a joint venture with Uber. In May this year, the company said it clocked a total 7 million autonomous miles, which was more than Waymo at the time. Yandex has been developing full-sized autonomous vehicle technology since 2017, which it’s tested in Tel Aviv, Israel and Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as Innopolis, Russia via its robotaxi fleet. The company first began public deliveries on its six-wheeled, 150-pound robot, the Yandex.Rover, last April in Skolkovo, Russia, using the same self-driving technology stack as the company’s autonomous cars.

“The technology is definitely very complicated, but we can see that it has already reached the level when it can start being deployed either in form of delivery robots or robotaxi services in small towns or specific districts of big cities,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We believe that in three to four years the technology will reach the level where the car can drive as safe and as efficient as an experienced human driver in rush hour in the center of cities like Moscow or New York.”

Yandex’s approach to commercialization is unique. Of all the companies developing autonomous technology for cars, Yandex is going to market with its robots first, “and it seems to be a pretty efficient way to do it,” said the spokesperson. “It took us two years to get from the idea of making a delivery robot in June 2018 to signing such a solid commercial contract,” she said.

The robots have already been tried and tested commercially in Russia via the food delivery platform Yandex.Eats and the express grocery delivery platform Yandex.Lavka. According to a statement by the company, Yandex.Rovers, which move at three to five miles per hour, can navigate pavements, pedestrian areas and crosswalks. They’re ideal for campus areas not accessible by car, and the service has already been fully integrated into the GrubHub app. From the user experience side of things, once the rover reaches its destination, the customer receives a push notification and comes outside to open the robot’s hatch through the app.

Yandex says its delivery robots can operate day or night, rain or snow, in controlled or uncontrolled pedestrian crossing scenarios. The rovers operate autonomously most of the time, but if they get into a complicated situation, like getting ridden by a drunk college student, they may send a request for remote assistance, according to a spokesperson for the company.

The company told TechCrunch it has not yet branded its robots to reflect the Grubhub partnership, so hopefully its goal of getting dozens of vehicles out this fall is not too much of a reach.

“Together with Yandex, we’re changing the way college students experience food delivery,” said Brian Madigan, vice president of corporate and campus partners at Grubhub, in a statement. “We’re excited to offer these cost-effective, scalable and quick food ordering and delivery capabilities to colleges and universities across the country that are looking to adapt to students’ unique dining needs. While college campuses are notoriously difficult for cars to navigate, specifically as it relates to food delivery, Yandex robots easily access parts of campuses that vehicles cannot — effectively removing a major hurdle universities face when implementing new technology.”

Now the question is, with a post-Covid fall semester around the corner, how many of those robots will make it back to Yandex after the frat boys decide the new hazing structure involves successfully stealing or vandalizing a robot?

Yandex said it also intends to continue developing its robotaxi service as it moves to commercialize more arms of the business and use its AV tech in a range of scenarios.

News: Nextdoor’s SPAC investor deck paints a picture of sizable scale and sticky users

• July 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

The company kicks off with a note that it has 27 million weekly active users and claims users in around one in three U.S. households. The argument, then, is that Nextdoor has scale.

The SPAC parade continues in this shortened week with news that community social network Nextdoor will go public via a blank-check company. The unicorn will merge with Khosla Ventures Acquisition Co. II, taking itself public and raising capital at the same time.

Per the former startup, the transaction with the Khosla-affiliated SPAC will generate gross proceeds of around $686 million, inclusive of a $270 million private investment in public equity, or PIPE, which is being funded by a collection of capital pools, some prior Nextdoor investors (including Tiger), Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar and Khosla Ventures itself.

Notably, Khosla is not a listed investor in the company per Crunchbase or PitchBook, indicating that even SPACs formed by venture capital firms can hunt for deals outside their parent’s portfolio.

Per a Nextdoor release, the transaction will value the company at a “pro forma equity [valuation] of approximately $4.3 billion.” That’s a great price for the firm that was most recently valued at $2.17 billion in a late 2019-era Series H worth $170 million, per PitchBook data. Those funds were invested at a flat $2.0 billion pre-money valuation.

So, what will public investors get the chance to buy into at the new, higher price? To answer that we’ll have to turn to the company’s SPAC investor deck.

Our general observations are that while Nextdoor’s SPAC deck does have some regular annoyances, it offers are clear-eyed look at the company’s financial performance both in historical terms and in terms of what it might accomplish in the future. Our usual mockery of SPAC charts mostly doesn’t apply. Let’s begin.

Nextdoor’s SPAC pitch

We’ll proceed through the deck in its original slide order to better understand the company’s argument for its value today, as well as its future worth.

The company kicks off with a note that it has 27 million weekly active users (neighbors, in its own parlance), and claims users in around one in three U.S. households. The argument, then, is that Nextdoor has scale.

A few slides later, Nextdoor details its mission: “To cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on.” While accounts like @BestOfNextdoor might make this mission statement as coherent as ExxonMobil saying that its core purpose was, say, atmospheric carbon reduction, we have to take it seriously. The company wants to bring people together. It can’t control what they do from there, as we’ve all seen. But the fact that rude people on Nextdoor is a meme stems from the same scale that the company was just crowing about.

Underscoring its active user counts are Nextdoor’s retention figures. Here’s how it describes that metric:

Image Credits: Nextdoor SPAC investor deck

These are monthly active users, mind, not weekly active, the figure that the company cited up top. So, the metrics are looser here. And the company is counting users as active if they have “started a session or opened a content email over the trailing 30 days.” How conservative is that metric? We’ll leave that for you to decide.

The company’s argument for its value continues in the following slide, with Nextdoor noting that users become more active as more people use the service in a neighborhood. This feels obvious, though it is nice, we suppose, to see the company codify our expectations in data.

Nextdoor then argues that its user base is distinct from that of other social networks and that its users are about as active as those on Twitter, albeit less active than on the major U.S. social networks (Facebook, Snap, Instagram).

Why go through the exercise of sorting Nextdoor into a cabal of social networks? Well, here’s why:

News: Announcing the startups pitching at TC Early Stage

• July 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

This Thursday and Friday, TechCrunch will host Early Stage – a virtual bootcamp for early stage founders. After the success of the spring event, on Friday, TC will feature 10 phenomenal early-stage startups to on the virtual stage. Hailing form around the States and the globe, founders will pitch on live, for five minutes, followed

This Thursday and Friday, TechCrunch will host Early Stage – a virtual bootcamp for early stage founders. After the success of the spring event, on Friday, TC will feature 10 phenomenal early-stage startups to on the virtual stage. Hailing form around the States and the globe, founders will pitch on live, for five minutes, followed by an intense Q&A with our expert panel of judges.

The judges for this pitch-off will be Ben Sun (Primary Venture Partners), Doug Landis (Emergence Capital), Leah Solivan (Fuel Capital) and Shardul Shah (Index Ventures).  Unlike last time, there will be no final round. Each company will only have one chance to impress the judges and the audience!

Alright, alright. I know you want to see who made the cut. Join us on Friday, July 9th to watch the second ever TC Early Stage Pitch-Off. Let’s take a look:

Session 1: 9:00 a.m. – 9:50 a.m. PDT

Mi Terro (City of Industry, CA, USA) – “The world’s first advanced material company that partners with food companies and farmers to create home compostable, single-use plastic-alternative packaging materials made from plant-based agricultural waste – this is a first-of-its-kind approach.

Press Sports App (Atlanta, GA, USA) – A lifelong sports social network for athletes from all levels and sports. Their deeply engaged community is creating system of record starting at the amateur level that has never been built before.

Snowball Wealth (San Francisco, CA, USA) – Provides personalized guidance to pay off debt and build wealth for the 30M women+ in America with student debt. Snowball provides users with a free student loan plan, which helps users save an average of $6K. They’re expanding to include a financial roadmap that’s community-driven and personalized so women+ can build wealth even as they pay down their debt.

My Expat Taxes (Vienna, Austria) – MyExpatTaxes is the leading U.S. expat tax software that guides users through the tax filing process faster and more affordable than any other competitor in the industry. It automates international tax treaties and expat tax benefits, helping U.S. expats stay compliant and claim thousands of dollars in refunds.

Speeko (Chicago, Illinois, USA) – AI-powered feedback on your voice in areas like pace, fillers, inclusivity, conciseness, and enunciation. Based on your speaking style, you’re matched with interactive exercises, courses, and vocal warm-ups. It’s like a gym membership for your voice, where you build muscle memory for speaking clearly and confidently.

Session 2: 10:10 a.m. – 11:05 a.m. PDT

Universal Prequal (Marlboro, NJ, USA) – Helps construction companies effectively manage risk by enabling them to find and vet qualified project teams capable of doing the work. Instead of the paper-intensive, time-consuming, expensive approach that exists throughout the industry today, our solution is online, easy-to-use, and cost-effective. Customers will know us as the national resource for managing risk based on comprehensive, reliable construction information.

T2D2.ai (New York City, NY, USA) – Provides continuous AI and computer vision-driven monitoring of buildings, bridges and other infrastructural assets. The T2D2 portal and dashboard gives asset owners and managers a detailed picture of all visible damage conditions – rank ordered by severity and geo-tagged for location information, so they can focus preventative maintenance efforts and avoid higher downstream repair costs as well as potential safety issues.

Boomerang (Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil) – A marketplace for consumer goods rental. We connect retailers, brands, and rental stores with customers that just want to use a product instead of owning it. For suppliers, Boomerang is a plug-and-play rental platform offering logistics, insurance, and online payments solution.

Stash Global (Wilmington, DE, USA) – Turned the most damaging cyber-attack of all, ransomware, into just another business problem that can be solved with the click of a button – without paying a cent (or cyber coin) of ransom. The No Ransom Ransomware Solution does it all: restores files; prevents access of frozen file content by attackers; eliminates ransom extortion.

Vyrill (San Francisco, CA, USA) – With the most powerful AI driven, in-video search, Vyrill is a fan video discovery, insights and content marketing platform enabling brand marketers to supercharge brand awareness and revenue with fan led content such as video reviews, unboxing, how-to videos and more. Vyrill is a Google for fan video and creators, capturing who, what, where and when –inside millions of videos.”

Winner Announcement: 11:30 a.m. PDT

News: Verizon demos THOR, its new vehicle for frontline rapid humanitarian response

• July 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

The increasingly intense heats bearing down feverishly across the globe are accelerating the number, scale, and complexity of disasters worldwide. Just in the past few weeks, we have seen record heat in the United States Pacific Northwest that has led to hundreds of deaths — with more heat on the way. Heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes,

The increasingly intense heats bearing down feverishly across the globe are accelerating the number, scale, and complexity of disasters worldwide. Just in the past few weeks, we have seen record heat in the United States Pacific Northwest that has led to hundreds of deaths — with more heat on the way.

Heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, typhoons and many other types of weather-related disasters create huge challenges for infrastructure providers like energy utilities and telecoms, who have to keep uptime as close to 100% as possible for their customers even in the midst of some of the most challenging environments humans have ever witnessed.

To that end, Verizon (which, as a reminder, is the ultimate parent company for TechCrunch for now) announced today the first demo unit of what it dubs its THOR vehicle, for Tactical Humanitarian Operations Response. Designed on top of a Ford F650 pickup truck chassis, THOR is designed to provide highly mobile and resilient connectivity to frontline responders and citizens through wireless technologies like 5G Ultra Wideband and satellite uplinks.

Verizon’s THOR vehicle can deploy wireless technologies like 5G and satellite uplinks to rapidly deploy connectivity to frontline responders. Image Credits: Verizon

The company developed the prototype in partnership with the Department of Defense’s NavalX and the SoCal Tech Bridge, and unveiled the prototype last week at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, just north of San Diego.

In addition to wireless connectivity, THOR can also potentially deploy a variety of drone capabilities. For instance, a vehicle could deploy a drone for search and rescue operations, or to help augment firefighters with intelligence on how a wildfire is developing over time.

As I discussed a few weeks ago, telcos like Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are increasing spending on a variety of resiliency initiatives, ranging from the rapid staging of mobile wireless equipment to novel solutions like AT&T’s FirstNet One, a dirigible capable of flying near a disaster zone to offer wireless services.

DisasterTech, as I have been dubbing it, has been gaining more attention of late from investors and companies both big and small as governments, the private sector, insurers, and individuals have to confront and respond to the intensifying nature of storms globally.

News: Twitter shares its ideas around new privacy features, including a way to hide your account from searches

• July 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Twitter today has shared a few more ideas it’s thinking about in terms of new features around conversation health and privacy. This includes a one-stop “privacy check-in” feature that would introduce Twitter’s newer conversation controls options to users, and others that would allow people to be more private on the service, or to more easily

Twitter today has shared a few more ideas it’s thinking about in terms of new features around conversation health and privacy. This includes a one-stop “privacy check-in” feature that would introduce Twitter’s newer conversation controls options to users, and others that would allow people to be more private on the service, or to more easily navigate between public and private tweets or their various accounts.

Of these, the privacy check-in feature would probably be of most use, as Twitter’s recent spurt of innovation has also made the service more complex. Over time, a centralized destination — like Google’s or Facebook’s Privacy Checkup where users can adjust their privacy controls — could become a valuable addition.

Twitter’s privacy check-in feature would walk users through a series of questions that help them think about how public or private they want to be on Twitter’s platform. For example, they could choose whether everyone can see their tweets or not, who’s allowed to send them direct messages, or who can tag them in photos.

Other new ideas under consideration include a tweak to the Compose screen to better highlight which account you’re posting from (and if it’s public), as well as another feature that would add reminders that appear when you reply to someone from a private account. The reminder would alert you that the account wouldn’t be able to see your response because your account is currently set to “protected.” It would also provide a tool to switch your tweets to public so you can participate in the conversation.

One of the more interesting concepts being considered, however, is related to your discoverability. Often, when someone is being harassed by a group, it begins to attract even more unwanted attention. While the user could report the trolls for abuse, it won’t immediately stop their attacks. To deal with this sort of troll brigade, some users set their account to private or delete their Twitter account altogether.

Twitter’s potential new feature would offer a third option: making your account hidden. Users could be alerted to the increase in negative attention their account was receiving through a push notification and then be pointed to new privacy controls that would let them disable the ability for other Twitter users to find them through search. One toggle would disable people from finding your account by searching for your username while another would disable the account from being recommended under the “Who To Follow” feature. You could also set time limits on how long you want these options disabled, in case you want to hide for a certain amount of time.

Image Credits: Twitter/Lena Emara (opens in a new window)

Twitter says these are, for now, just ideas — not features being built. It wants to hear from the Twitter user community what they think, and then weigh that feedback before going forward.

The company has been posting several other design concepts like this in recent days, including, just last week, a few new ideas about tweeting only to friends or using different personas, among other things. Earlier this month, the company also showed off concepts around a potential “unmention” feature that would let users untag themselves from others’ tweets.

As of yet, Twitter hasn’t made any decisions on which, if any, of its new concepts will be turned into real-world features. But they stand as another example of a company that’s been re-enegrized after years of stagnation to become more innovative, and at a much faster pace. Late last year, for example, Twitter launched its Stories product called Fleets to all users. It has since rolled out or is soon rolling out a number of significant new products, including its audio networking service Twitter Spaces, a crowd-sourced factchecker Birdwatch, a premium subscription called Twitter Blue, newsletters from Revue, a tip jar, and a creator subscription called Super Follow, which just opened applications.

News: What I learned the hard way from naming 30+ startups

• July 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

How should a founder go about effectively naming their baby startup and avoid picking a name that will hurt them?

There’s a lot wrapped up in a name: feelings, emotions, connotation, unconscious bias, personal history. It’s an identity — it gives something meaning and importance.

In leading marketing and brand at High Alpha, I think about naming quite a bit. As a venture studio, we co-found and launch five to 10 new software startups every year. It is my team’s responsibility to create and build out the brands for all the new companies we start, including everything from naming and domain acquisition to brand identity and websites. Over the past five years, we’ve named more than 30 software startups at High Alpha.

As a soon-to-be first-time parent, the idea of naming has taken on a whole new meaning and importance in my life. Even though I help name new companies for a living, I now fully understand the paralysis that often comes when faced with the task of deciding the name for someone or something that’s especially important to you.

Because of this, I’ve always tried to take an objective, pragmatic approach to naming a company with our CEOs and other startups. Naming is an incredibly difficult and nuanced process. It’s fraught with subjectiveness and personal preference. And to top it all off, most founders have zero (or very little) experience in naming.

The truth is that business names fall on a bell curve — you have a small number of outliers that actively contribute to your success and a small number of outliers that actively impair your ability to succeed. The vast majority, though, fall somewhere in the middle in their impact on your business.

So, how should a founder go about effectively naming their baby startup and not picking a name that will hurt them? I’m sharing my own criteria and lessons for how to go about naming your startup, how to evaluate a company name and what makes for a good company name.

Is the name ownable?

As a founder, one of the first criteria to look at is ownability and URL availability. Nowadays, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a name where the .com is still available. I oftentimes will look at .io, .co, get_______.com, or _____hq.com as my top alternatives to a .com, but I always still prefer if the .com is potentially attainable in the future. It may be parked by a domain investor or someone asking a ridiculous price, but that’s always better than an established business using your .com. If not, you will always be fighting a search battle with some other brand that owns your .com.

This goes much further than just the availability of the coveted .com domain, though. You should evaluate the competitiveness and search congestion around your branded keywords. A company named “Apple” or “Lumber” is going to have a really hard time competing for search placements, even if they don’t sell computers or building supplies. An established name and word is also going to come with existing connotations and previous experiences in your audience’s mind. You want a name free from as much baggage as possible so you can easily build your own connotations and memories.

News: Nobody wins as DoD finally pulls the plug on controversial $10B JEDI contract

• July 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

After several years of fighting and jockeying for position by the biggest cloud infrastructure companies in the world, the Pentagon finally pulled the plug on the controversial winner-take-all $10 billion JEDI contract today. In the end, nobody won. “With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI cloud contract, which has long

After several years of fighting and jockeying for position by the biggest cloud infrastructure companies in the world, the Pentagon finally pulled the plug on the controversial winner-take-all $10 billion JEDI contract today. In the end, nobody won.

“With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps,” a Pentagon spokesperson stated.

The contract procurement process began in 2018 with a call for RFPs for a $10 billion, decade long contract to handle the cloud infrastructure strategy for The Pentagon. Pentagon spokesperson Heather Babb told TechCrunch why they were going with the. single-winner approach: “Single award is advantageous because, among other things, it improves security, improves data accessibility and simplifies the Department’s ability to adopt and use cloud services,” she said at the time.

From the start though, companies objected to the single winner approach, believing that the Pentagon would be better served with a multi-vendor approach. Some companies, particularly Oracle believed the procurement process was designed to favor Amazon.

In the end it came down to a pair of finalists — Amazon and Microsoft — and in the end Microsoft won. But Amazon believed that it had superior technology and only lost the deal because of direct interference by the previous president, who had open disdain for then CEO Jeff Bezos (who is also the owner of the Washington Post newspaper).

Amazon decided to fight the decision in court, and after months of delay, the Pentagon made the decision that it was time to move on. In a blog post, Microsoft took a swipe at Amazon for precipitating the delay.

“The 20 months since DoD selected Microsoft as its JEDI partner highlights issues that warrant the attention of policymakers: when one company can delay, for years, critical technology upgrades for those who defend our nation, the protest process needs reform. Amazon filed its protest in November 2019 and its case was expected to take at least another year to litigate and yield a decision, with potential appeals afterward,” Microsoft wrote in its blog post about the end of the deal.

It seems like a fitting end to a project that felt like it was doomed from the beginning. From the moment the Pentagon announced this contract with the cutesy twist on Star Wars name, the procurement process has taken more twist and turns than a TV soap.

In the end, there was a lot of sound and fury and now a lot of nothing. We move onto whatever cloud procurement process happens next.

Note: We have a request into Amazon for a comment and will update the story when they respond.