Tag Archives: Blog

News: The Daily Crunch: TechCrunch’s parent company sold for $5B, Duolingo’s origin story

• May 3, 2021
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To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. TechCrunch’s new home The original plan was to spend a minute today explaining that the Daily Crunch is now being put together by a new and expanded team. I, your friend Alex,

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

TechCrunch’s new home

The original plan was to spend a minute today explaining that the Daily Crunch is now being put together by a new and expanded team. I, your friend Alex, will be writing and collecting the main sections from here on out. We’ll also have input from Walter and Annie on the Extra Crunch side of things (like today’s Exchange column!), along with community notes from Drew and more. It’s going to be great.

But with the news out today that TechCrunch’s parent company’s parent company is selling our parent company to a new parent company, we can’t do anything but admit that our newsletter shakeup is hardly the biggest news story of the day.

You can read more of TechCrunch’s coverage of the deal here. We will have more on the matter in the coming weeks. You’ll learn more about it as we do.

I am beyond excited about getting the chance to write to you every day. A big thank you to Anthony Ha, who ran this fine newsletter for so long. But there is a lot of startup and tech news to get through today, so let’s put aside private equity buyouts of legacy media assets for the moment and get into the stuff we care about the most.

The big story: The Duolingo EC-1

TechCrunch has covered the explosive edtech sector extensively over the last year (some examples here and here), largely thanks to Natasha’s work. She joined the TC team just before the pandemic, making her focus on education technology instantly prescient as the world went into lockdown. Remote education became the default, and several billion dollars in venture capital quickly chased the trend.

Now, on perhaps the other end of the COVID era, Natasha just published a deep dive into one of the most fascinating companies in the edtech arena: Duolingo. Per her reporting in her brand-new EC-1 investigating the company, Duolingo has scaled to 500 million users and $190 million in 2020 bookings.

Edtech is now big business, and after a history of being a place where venture capital goes to die, it’s instead a red-hot sector with a . I’m still chewing on the 10,000+ words that we just shipped on Duolingo, but it’s clear already that Natasha crushed this particular assignment.

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Startups and venture capital: Either NFTs are the next big thing or a lot of people are very wrong

Let’s talk startups, yeah? Turning to the day’s news, I found a few gems for your delectation.

We’ll start with Zoomo, an Australian e-bike company (formerly Bolt Bikes) that wants delivery folks to snag a subscription to its two-wheeled zoomers. As TechCrunch recently reported, you may have heard of the company after it “made a name for itself through partnerships with Uber Eats and DoorDash to help delivery workers access e-bikes through weekly subscriptions at discounted rates.”

It has since expanded to 10,000 bikes internationally and wants to work with companies of all sorts on getting their workers kitted about with its hardware. And it just raised $12 million. Let’s see how far its new capital allows the company to, er, scoot ahead.

Next up is Gatheround, which just raised $3.5 million in a seed round. The company, formerly known as Icebreaker, helps remote teams conduct engaging video meetings. Which is not a bad idea, as sometimes you need a little help to break the damn ice.

Per our own Mary Ann Azevedo, “Homebrew and Bloomberg Beta co-led the company’s latest raise, which included participation from angel investors, such as Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson, Meetup co-founder Scott Heiferman, Li Jin and Lenny Rachitsky.”

Finally, it is impossible to cover startups in 2021 without NFTs cropping up somewhere, so let’s allow Lucas Matney to tap our brains into the cryptoverse:

The creators behind CryptoPunks, one of the most popular NFT projects on the web, just revealed their latest project called Meebits. The project boasts 20,000 procedurally generated 3D characters that are tradeable on the Ethereum blockchain.

I won’t lie, why not procedurally generate 200,000? Or 2,000,000? Or 20? A lot of my friends are tweeting about bored apes and breeding digital horses. Meanwhile, I sit around a stack of paper books feeling at once like a caveman and an oracle able to see what won’t last. Either way, it’s the year of non-fungible digital ownership of proof of digital ownership of fungible images.

Further reading:

• Hangry, an Indonesian cloud kitchen startup with plans to become a global F&B company, closes $13M Series A
• Avatar startup Genies scores $65 million in funding round led by Mary Meeker’s Bond

The tech giants: Twitter vs. Clubhouse

Turning to the Big Tech companies, there was a good chunk of news today, the most important of which is that Twitter’s push into live audio is no joke. Nor is it some sort of side project that never really gets the full attention of the social giant’s product team. Instead, Twitter announced today that “it’s making Twitter Spaces available to any account with 600 followers or more, including both iOS and Android users,” Sarah reports.

Even more, the company also “officially unveiled some of the features it’s preparing to launch, like Ticketed Spaces, scheduling features, reminders, support for co-hosting, accessibility improvements and more.” Get hype, kids; Twitter versus Clubhouse is now in its second round and we’re pretty hype about it.

Two more things for your reading pleasure: When it comes to the biggest tech companies, a key topic — and the current theme of a lawsuit between Team Fornite and Team Dongle — has been the cut of revenues that app stores of all stripes get to take. Long stuck at 30%, a rate that Apple is apparently determined to stick to regardless of how poorly it makes them look, there’s movement on the matter.

Today, Epic Games bought ArtStation and instantly cut its commission rate from the 30% that it was to the 12% that Epic now charges on its own games store. Microsoft previously reduced its cut to 12%. That sound you hear is Apple screaming as some of its record net income is slowly eroded by more creator-friendly business practices.

Finally, in the world of Big Tech, Dell is selling Boomi to help cover the debts it accrued by buying EMC. Ron Miller has the details.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Analytics as a service: Why more enterprises should consider outsourcing

As KPIs go, return on experience (RoX) ranks near the top of the list. Unfortunately, many startups have no way to measure RoX — doing so requires a holistic approach that exceeds the capacity of most growth-focused, early-stage companies.

Startups that need to develop a data strategy while conserving engineering resources are driving growth in the analytics-as-a-service (AaaS) market. If you’re looking for insights into winning customers over strategically, cutting technical costs and making better decisions faster, AaaS can help you set realistic expectations.

How to attract large investors to your direct investing platform

A changing regulatory environment and pandemic-fueled growth has created a lot of new wealth and increased interest in direct investing.

In a guest post for Extra Crunch, investor David Teten examined several online platforms that serve as market-makers to get a better sense of how they attract investors and increase engagement.

These companies play for high stakes, says Teten, because a competent direct-investing platform must be able to operate as seamlessly as a traditional fund.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Community

Come hang out on our shiny new Extra Crunch Discord server. Why do we have a Discord server? Great question; glad you asked. TechCrunch writers, company founders, investors and everyone in between can’t keep up with noisy Twitter banter in a meaningful way, so now we have a home to chat about just about anything that’s on your mind. Join us!

We’re absolutely thrilled to have FirstMark Capital Managing Partner Rick Heitzmann and Orchard CEO Court Cunningham join us on an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live. The event takes place on May 5 at 3 p.m. EDT/noon PDT. Register for free here.

Image Credits: Orchard / FirstMark Capital

News: Amazon’s over-the-top business, including IMDb TV and Twitch, tops 120M monthly viewers

• May 3, 2021
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Amazon’s free, ad-supported streaming service IMDb TV is getting its own mobile app. The company announced the news today at its first-ever NewFronts presentation to advertisers, where it also shared that its over-the-top streaming businesses combined — meaning, IMDb TV, Twitch, live sports like Thursday Night Football, Amazon’s News app and others — have now

Amazon’s free, ad-supported streaming service IMDb TV is getting its own mobile app. The company announced the news today at its first-ever NewFronts presentation to advertisers, where it also shared that its over-the-top streaming businesses combined — meaning, IMDb TV, Twitch, live sports like Thursday Night Football, Amazon’s News app and others — have now grown to more than 120 million monthly viewers.

This over-the-top business, or Amazon OTT as it’s called, includes anywhere ads show up alongside content on the IMDb TV app, Twitch’s game streaming site, during live sports Amazon streams through Prime Video, its 3P network and broadcaster apps and its Amazon’s News app for Fire TV.

IMDb TV viewership, in particular, jumped 138% year-over-year, Amazon noted.

The ad-supported service, which likely benefited from the same pandemic bump that drove streaming service viewership higher across the board last year, is something of a rival to other free, ad-supported streamers, like Fox’s Tubi, ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV or Roku’s The Roku Channel. However, more like Roku’s hub, Amazon leverages IMDb TV to help it sell its own media devices by promising users easy access to free, streaming content.

Today, that’s resulted in the IMDb TV app seeing the majority of its usage on Fire TV. But over the past several months, the app has become more broadly available, with launches on Roku, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation 4 consoles, Xbox One and Series X devices, LG Smart TVs, Nvidia, Sony Android TV and TiVo Android TV devices, Amazon says.

Now it will get its own dedicated mobile app, as well, instead of only a small section inside the IMDb app where the service’s content can be found today on smartphones. The new standalone app will arrive this summer on both iOS and Android, says Amazon.

Amazon also told advertisers about IMDb TV’s current user base, noting that 62% were in between ages 18 and 49. And they spend 5.5 hours per week on the app, on average.

The forthcoming mobile launch was one of several announcements Amazon made today at its Newfronts presentation today.

The company also detailed its upcoming IMDb TV slate, including unscripted series “Luke Bryan: My Dirt Road Diary,” “Bug Out” and “Untitled Jeff Lewis Project” as well as scripted releases “Blessed and Highly Favored,” “Greek Candy,” “Primo,” “The Fed,” and “The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh, PA.” Music duo Tegan and Sara’s memoir “High School” will be adapted as an original series for IMDb TV. IMDb TV also announced a new crime drama, “Leverage: Redemption,” and police drama, “On Call.”

IMDb TV parent company Amazon, meanwhile, expanded its deal with the NFL for Thursday Night Football, which now runs 11 seasons, starting with the 2022 season instead of the following year.

News: Ford, BMW lead Solid Power’s $130M Series B round

• May 3, 2021
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Solid state battery systems have long been considered the next breakthrough in battery technology, with multiple startups vying to be the first to commercialization. Automakers have been some of the top investors in the technology, each of them seeking the edge that will make their electric vehicles safer, faster and with increased range. Ford Motor

A Solid Power manufacturing engineer holds two 20 ampere hour (Ah) all solid-state battery cells for the BMW Group and Ford Motor Company. The 20 ampere hour (Ah) all solid-state battery cells were produced on Solid Power’s Colorado-based pilot production line. Source: Solid Power.

Solid state battery systems have long been considered the next breakthrough in battery technology, with multiple startups vying to be the first to commercialization. Automakers have been some of the top investors in the technology, each of them seeking the edge that will make their electric vehicles safer, faster and with increased range.

Ford Motor Company and BMW Group have put their money on battery technology company Solid Power.

The Louisville, Colorado-based SSB developed said Monday its latest $130 million Series B funding round was led by Ford and BMW, the latest signal that the two OEMs see SSBs powering the future of transportation. Under the investment, Ford and BMW are equal equity owners and company representatives will join Solid Power’s board.

Solid Power received additional investment in the round from Volta Energy Technologies, the venture capital firm spun out of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

Solid state batteries are so named because they lack a liquid electrolyte, as Mark Harris explained in an ExtraCrunch article earlier this year. Liquid electrolyte solutions are usually flammable and at risk of overheating, so SSBs are considered to be generally safer. The real value of SSBs versus their lithium-ion counterparts is the energy density. Solid Power says its batteries can provide as much as a 50% to 100% increase in energy density compared to rechargeable batteries. Theoretically, electric vehicles with more energy dense batteries can travel longer distances on a single charge.

This latest round of investment will help Solid Power boost its manufacturing to produce battery cells with the company’s highest ampere hour (Ah) output yet. Under separate joint development agreements with Ford and BMW, it will deliver to the OEMs 100 Ah cells for testing and vehicle integration from 2022.

Until this point, the company has been manufacturing cells with 2 Ah and 10 Ah output. “Hundreds” of 2 Ah battery cells were validated by Ford and BMW late last year, Solid Power said in a statement. Meanwhile, it is currently producing 20 Ah solid-state batteries on a pilot basis with standard lithium-ion equipment.

As opposed to the 20 Ah pilot-scale cells – which are composed of 22-layers at 9×20 cm – these 100 Ah cells will have a larger footprint and even more layers, Solid Power spokesman Will McKenna told TechCrunch. (‘Layers’ refers to the number of double-sided cathodes, McKenna explained – so the 20 Ah cell has 22 cathodes and 22 anodes, with an all-solid electrolyte separator in-between each, all in a single cell.)

Unlike Solid Power’s manufacturing, traditional lithium-ion batteries must undergo electrolyte filling and cycling in their production processes. Solid Power says these additional steps accounts for 5% and 30% of capital expenditure in a typical GWh-scale lithium-ion facility.

This isn’t the first time Solid Power has landed investments from the automakers. The company’s $20 million Series A in 2018 attracted capital from BMW and Ford, as well as Samsung, Hyundai, Volta and others. It’s part of a new wave of companies that have attracted the attention of OEMs. Other notable examples include Volkswagen-backed QuantumScape and General Motors, which has put its money on SES.

Ford is also independently researching advanced battery technologies and is planning on opening a $185 million R&D battery lab, the company said last week.

News: Sony announces investment and partnership with Discord to bring the chat app to PlayStation

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Sony and Discord have announced a partnership that will integrate the latter’s popular gaming-focused chat app with PlayStation’s own built-in social tools. It’s a big move and a fairly surprising one given how recently acquisition talks were in the air — Sony appears to have offered a better deal than Microsoft, taking an undisclosed minority

Sony and Discord have announced a partnership that will integrate the latter’s popular gaming-focused chat app with PlayStation’s own built-in social tools. It’s a big move and a fairly surprising one given how recently acquisition talks were in the air — Sony appears to have offered a better deal than Microsoft, taking an undisclosed minority stake in the company ahead of a rumored IPO.

The exact nature of the partnership is not expressed in the brief announcement post. The closest we come to hearing what will actually happen is that the two companies plan to “bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year,” which at least is easy enough to imagine.

Discord has partnered with console platforms before, though its deal with Microsoft was not a particularly deep integration. This is almost certainly more than a “friends can see what you’re playing on PS5” and more of a “this is an alternative chat infrastructure for anyone on a Sony system.” Chances are it’ll be a deep, system-wide but clearly Discord-branded option — such as “Start a voice chat with Discord” option when you invite a friend to your game or join theirs.

The timeline of early 2022 also suggests that this is a major product change, probably coinciding with a big platform update on Sony’s long-term PS5 roadmap.

While the new PlayStation is better than the old one when it comes to voice chat, the old one wasn’t great to begin with, and Discord is not just easier to use but something millions of gamers already do use daily. And these days, if a game isn’t an exclusive, being robustly cross-platform is the next best option — so PS5 players being able to seamlessly join and chat with PC players will reduce a pain point there.

Of course Microsoft has its own advantages, running both the Xbox and Windows ecosystems, but it has repeatedly fumbled this opportunity and the acquisition of Discord might have been the missing piece that tied it all together. That bird has flown, of course, and while Microsoft’s acquisition talks reportedly valued Discord at some $10 billion, it seems the growing chat app decided it would rather fly free with an IPO and attempt to become the dominant voice platform everywhere rather than become a prized pet.

Sony has done its part, financially speaking, by taking part in Discord’s recent $100 million H round. The amount they contributed is unknown, but perforce it can’t be more than a small minority stake given how much the company has taken on and its total valuation.

News: How to lead a digital transformation — ethically

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Leaders need to embrace an all-new learning curve: How to engage in digital transformation that includes ethics by design.

The fact that COVID-19 accelerated the need for digital transformation across virtually all sectors is old news. What companies are doing to propel success under the circumstances has been under the spotlight. However, how they do it has managed to find a place in the shadows.

Simply put, the explosive increase in innovation and adoption of digital solutions shouldn’t be allowed to take place at the expense of ethical considerations.

This is about morals — but it’s also about the bottom line. Stakeholders, both internal and external, are increasingly intolerant of companies that blur (or ignore) ethical lines. These realities add up to a need for leaders to embrace an all-new learning curve: How to engage in digital transformation that includes ethics by design.

Ethics as an afterthought is asking for problems

It’s easy to rail against the evils of the executive lifestyle or golden parachuting, but more often than not, a pattern of ethics violations arises from companywide culture, not leadership alone. Ideally, employees act ethically because it aligns with their personal values. However, at a minimum, they should understand the risk that an ethical breach represents to the organization.

In my experience, those conversations are not being held. Call it poor communication or lack of vision, but most companies rarely model potential ethical risks — at least not openly. If those discussions take place, they’re typically between members of upper management, behind closed doors.

Why don’t ethical concerns get more of a “town hall” treatment? The answer may come down to an unwillingness to let go of traditional thinking about business hierarchies. It could also be related to the strong (and ironically, toxic) cultural message that positivity rules. Case in point: I’ve listened to leaders say they want to create a culture of disruptive thinking — only to promptly tell an employee who speaks up that they “lack a growth mindset.”

What’s the answer, then? There are three solutions I’ve found to be effective:

1. Making ethics a core value of the organization.
2. Embracing transparency.
3. Proactively developing strategies to contend with ethical challenges and violations.

These simple solutions are a great starting point to solve ethics issues regarding digital transformation and beyond. They cause leaders to look into the heart of the company and make decisions that will impact the organization for years to come.

Interpersonal dynamics are a concern in the digital transformation arena

Making digital shifts is, by nature, a technical operation. It requires personnel with advanced and varied expertise in areas such as AI and data operations. Leaders in the digital transformation space are expected to possess enough cross-domain competency to tackle tough problems.

That’s a big ask — bringing a host of technically minded people together can easily lead to a culture of expertise arrogance that leaves people who don’t know the lingo intimidated and reluctant to ask questions.

Digital transformation isn’t simply about infrastructure or tools. It is, at its heart, about change management, and a multifunctional approach is needed to ensure a healthy transition. The biggest mistake companies can make is assuming that only technical experts should be at the table. The silos that are built as a result inevitably turn into echo chambers — the last place you want to hold a conversation about ethics.

In the rush to go digital, regardless of how technical the problem, the solution will still be a fundamentally human-centric one.

Ethical digital transformation needs a starting point

Not all ethical imperatives related to digital transformation are as debatable as the suggestion that it should be people-first; some are much more black and white, like the fact that you have to start somewhere to get anywhere.

Luckily, “somewhere” doesn’t have to be from scratch. Government, risk and compliance (GRC) standards can be used to create a highly structured framework that’s mostly closed to interpretation and provides a solid foundation for building out and adopting digital solutions.

The utility of GRC models applies equally to startup multinationals and offers more than just a playbook; thoughtful application of GRC standards can also help with leadership evaluation, progress reports and risk analysis. Think of it like using bowling bumpers — they won’t guarantee you roll a strike, but they’ll definitely keep the ball out of the gutter.

Of course, a given company might not know how to create a GRC-based framework (just like most of us would be at a loss if tasked with building a set of bowling bumpers). This is why many turn to providers like IBM OpenPages, COBIT and ITIL for prefab foundations. These “starter kits” all share a single goal: Identify policies and controls that are relevant to your industry or organization and draw lines from those to pivotal compliance points.

Although getting started with the GRC process is typically cloud-based and at least partially automated, it requires organizationwide input and transparency. It can’t be effectively run by specific departments, or in a strictly top-down fashion. In fact, the single most important thing to understand about implementing GRC standards is that it will almost certainly fail unless both an organization’s leadership and broader culture fully support the direction in which it points.

An ethics-first mindset protects employees and the bottom line

Today’s leaders — executives, entrepreneurs, influencers and more — can’t be solely concerned with “winning” the digital race. Arguably, transformation is more of a marathon than a sprint, but either way, technique matters. In pursuing the end goal of competitive advantage, the how and why matter just as much as the what.

This is true for all arms of an organization. Internal stakeholders such as owners and employees risk their careers and reputations by tolerating a peripheral approach to ethics. External stakeholders like customers, investors and suppliers have just as much to lose. Their mutual understanding of this fact is what’s behind the collective, cross-industry push for transparency.

We’ve all seen the massive blowback against individuals and brands in the public eye who allow ethical lapses on their watch. It’s impossible to fully eliminate the risk of experiencing something similar, but it is a risk that can be managed. The danger is in letting the “tech blinders” of digital transformation interfere with your view of the big picture.

Companies that want to mitigate that risk and rise to the challenges of the digital era in a truly ethical way need to start by simply having conversations about what ethics, transparency and inclusivity mean — both in and around the organization. They need to follow up those conversations with action where necessary, and with open-mindedness across the board.

It’s smart to be worried about innovation lag in a time when enterprise is moving and shifting faster than ever, but there is time to make all the proper ethical considerations. Failing to do so will only derail you down the line.

News: CryptoPunks maker Larva Labs launches their new NFT project, Meebits

• May 3, 2021
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The creators behind CryptoPunks, one of the most popular NFT projects on the web, just revealed their latest project called Meebits. The project boasts 20,000 procedurally generated 3D characters that are tradeable on the Ethereum blockchain. There have been hundreds of 3D avatar NFT platforms popping up over the past several months hoping to gain

The creators behind CryptoPunks, one of the most popular NFT projects on the web, just revealed their latest project called Meebits. The project boasts 20,000 procedurally generated 3D characters that are tradeable on the Ethereum blockchain.

There have been hundreds of 3D avatar NFT platforms popping up over the past several months hoping to gain momentum and capture the enthusiasm of crypto buyers, but the traction of the Larva Labs team whose pixel portrait CryptoPunks project has netted more than $550 million in lifetime sales will likely make this platform another hit. Meebits arrives at a time of peak hype for their first effort CryptoPunks which is weeks away from a Christie’s auction that many are expecting to see fetch a price in the tens of million of dollars. It also arrives as Ethereum has had one of its best weeks on record, punching through all-time-highs nearly every day this week. Ethereum is currently trading at just shy of $3,300.

In a blog post, the Larva Labs creators posit that they hope that Meebits will eventually serve as avatars for “virtual worlds, games and VR.” Meebits not only boast a revised art style, but Larva Labs has made some underlying changes to the no-fee marketplace, the most significant of which is likely the ability to customize trades allowing users to swap Meebits with each other in a more complex manner.

In my profile of the company’s CryptoPunks project last month, the team’s founders hoped that their new project would lower the barrier of entry as CryptoPunks prices reached stratospheric heights, it seems that even by doubling the total supply (20,000 avatars versus CryptoPunks 10,000 figures) Meebits are poised to still be an expensive affair.

The company is distributing the Meebits avatars through a Dutch auction, meaning the price for buying and minting a Meebit will lower to zero Eth (plus Ethereum gas fees) over the course of a week. Currently users are paying 2.49 Eth to mint a Meebit a random, a nearly $8,500 investment at current prices. Nevertheless, around 2,000 of them have already sold, meaning the creators have already pulled in nearly $20 million worth of Eth after just over two hours on the market.

News: Volvo AG and Daimler Trucks team up in hydrogen fuel cell joint venture

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Competitors Volvo AB and Daimler Trucks are teaming up to produce hydrogen fuel cells for long-haul trucks, which the companies say will lower development costs and boost production volumes. The joint venture, which is called cellcentric, aims to bring large-scale “gigafactory” production levels of hydrogen fuel cells to Europe by 2025. While the two companies

Competitors Volvo AB and Daimler Trucks are teaming up to produce hydrogen fuel cells for long-haul trucks, which the companies say will lower development costs and boost production volumes. The joint venture, which is called cellcentric, aims to bring large-scale “gigafactory” production levels of hydrogen fuel cells to Europe by 2025.

While the two companies are teaming up to produce the fuel cells via the cellcentric venture, all other aspects of truck production will remain separate. The location of the forthcoming gigafactory will be announced next year. The companies also did not specify the production capacity of the forthcoming factory.

Even as Volvo AB and Daimler Trucks used ambition-signaling terms like “gigafactory” — a term popularized by Tesla due to the giga capacity of its factories — executives added a few cautionary caveats on their goal. Europe’s hydrogen economy will depend in part on whether the European Union can produce a policy framework that further drives down costs and invests in refueling stations and other infrastructure, executives noted in a media briefing. In other words, manufacturers like Daimler and Volvo that are looking to invest in hydrogen face a ‘chicken and the egg’ problem: boosting fuel cell production only makes sense if it occurs in tandem with the buildout of a hydrogen network, including refueling stations, pipelines to transport hydrogen, and renewable energy resources to produce it.

“In the long run, I mean, this must be a business-driven activity as everything else,” Volvo CTO Lars Stenqvist told TechCrunch. “But in the in the first wave, there must be support from our politicians.”

Together with other European truck manufacturers, the two companies are calling for a build out of hydrogen refueling stations around Europe of around 300 by 2025 and around 1,000 by 2030.

The Swedish and German automakers suggested policies such as a tax on carbon, incentives for CO2-neutral technologies or an emissions trading system could all help ensure cost-competitiveness against fossil fuels. Heavy-duty trucking will only compose a fraction of hydrogen demand, around 10%, Stenqvist pointed out, with the rest being used by industries such as steel manufacturing and the chemical industry. That means the push for hydrogen-supportive policies will likely be heard from other sectors, as well.

One of the biggest challenges for the new venture will be working to decrease inefficiencies associated with converting hydrogen to electricity. “That’s the core of engineering in trucking, to improve the energy efficiency of the vehicle,” Stenqvist said. “That has always been in the DNA of engineers in our industry … energy efficiency will be even more important in an electrified world.” He estimated that the cost of hydrogen would need to be in the range of $3-4 per kilogram to make it a cost-effective alternative to diesel.

Volvo is also making investments in battery electric technologies and Stenqvist said he sees potential use cases for internal combustion engines (ICE) run on renewable biofuels. He is in agreement with Bosch executives who said earlier this month that they see a place for ICE in the future. “I’m also convinced that there is a place for the combustion engines for a long period of time, I don’t see any end, I don’t see any retirement date for the combustion engines,” he said.

“From a political side, I think it would be completely wrong to ban a technology. Politicians should not ban – should not approve technologies – they should point out the direction, they should talk about what they want to achieve. And then it’s up to us as engineers to come up with the technical solutions.”

News: Avatar startup Genies scores $65 million in funding round led by Mary Meeker’s Bond

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Over the past several years, I’ve covered my fair share of upstart avatar companies that were all chasing the same dream — building out a customizable platform for a digital persona that gained wide adoption across games and digital spaces. Few of those startups I’ve covered in the past are still around. But by netting

Over the past several years, I’ve covered my fair share of upstart avatar companies that were all chasing the same dream — building out a customizable platform for a digital persona that gained wide adoption across games and digital spaces. Few of those startups I’ve covered in the past are still around. But by netting a string of successful partnerships with celebrity musicians, LA-based Genies has come closer than any startup before it to realizing the full vision of a wide-reaching avatar platform.

The company announced today that they’ve closed a $65 million Series B led by Mark Meeker’s firm Bond. NEA, Breyer Capital, Tull Investment Group, NetEase, Dapper Labs and Coinbase Ventures also participated in the deal. Mark Meeker will be joining the Genies board. The company didn’t disclose the Genies’ most recent valuation.

This funding comes at an inflection point for the eight-year-old company, evidenced by the investments from NBA Top Shot-maker Dapper Labs and crypto giant Coinbase. As announced last week, the company is rolling out an NFT platform on Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain, partnering closely with the startup who will be building out the backend for a Genies avatar accessories storefront. Like Dapper Labs has leveraged its exclusive deals with sports leagues to ship NFTs with official backing, Genies is planning to capitalize on its partnerships with celebrities in its roster including Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes, Cardi B and others to create a platform for buying and trading avatar accessories en masse.

In October, the company announced a brand partnerships with Gucci, opening up the startup to another big market opportunity.

Genies’ business has largely focused on leveraging high-profile partnerships to give its entertainer clients a digital presence that can spice up what they’re sharing on social media and beyond. As they’ve rolled out avatar creation to all users through beta mobile apps, Genies has been focusing on one of the more explicit dreams of the avatar companies before it; building out a broad network of avatar users and a broad network of compatible platforms through its SDK.

“An avatar is a vehicle to be able to showcase more of your authentic self,” Genies CEO Akash Nigam tells TechCrunch. “It’s not limited by real world constraints, it’s an alter-ego personality.”

Trends in the NFT world have provided new realms of exploration for Genies, but so have broader pandemic era trends that have pushed more users to wholly digital spaces where they socialize and connect. “The pandemic accelerated everything,” Nigam says.

Nigam emphasizes that despite the major opportunity its upcoming NFT platform will present, Genies is still an avatar company first-and-foremost, not an NFT startup, though he does say he is believes crypto-backed digital goods are going to be around for a long time. He has few doubts that the current environment around digital goods helped juice Genies’ funding round which he says was “6-8X oversubscribed” and was an opportunistic play for the startup, which “could have gone years without having to raise.”

The company says their crypto marketplace will launch in the coming months, as early as this summer.

News: Twitter expands Spaces to anyone with 600+ followers, details plans for tickets, reminders and more

• May 3, 2021
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Twitter Spaces, the company’s new live audio rooms feature, is opening up more broadly. The company announced today it’s making Twitter Spaces available to any account with 600 followers or more, including both iOS and Android users. It also officially unveiled some of the features it’s preparing to launch, like Ticketed Spaces, scheduling features, reminders,

Twitter Spaces, the company’s new live audio rooms feature, is opening up more broadly. The company announced today it’s making Twitter Spaces available to any account with 600 followers or more, including both iOS and Android users. It also officially unveiled some of the features it’s preparing to launch, like Ticketed Spaces, scheduling features, reminders, support for co-hosting, accessibility improvements, and more.

Along with the expansion, Twitter is making Spaces more visible on its platform, too. The company notes it has begun testing the ability to find and join a Space from a purple bubble around someone’s profile picture right from the Home timeline.

Image Credits: Twitter

Twitter says it decided on the 600 follower figure as being the minimum to gain access to Twitter Spaces based on its earlier testing. Accounts with 600 or more followers tend to have “a good experience” hosting live conversations because they have a larger existing audience who can tune in. However, Twitter says it’s still planning to bring Spaces to all users in the future.

In the meantime, it’s speeding ahead with new features and developments. Twitter has been building Spaces in public, taking into consideration user feedback as it prioritizes features and updates. Already, it has built out an expanded set of audience management controls, as users requested, introduced a way for hosts to mute all speakers at once, and added the laughing emoji to its set of reactions, after users requested it.

Now, its focus is turning towards creators. Twitter Spaces will soon support multiple co-hosts, and creators will be able to better market and even charge for access to their live events on Twitter Spaces. One feature, arriving in the next few weeks, will allow users to schedule and set reminders about Spaces they don’t want to miss. This can also help creators who are marketing their event in advance, as part of the RSVP process could involve pushing users to “set a reminder” about the upcoming show.

Twitter Spaces’ rival, Clubhouse, also just announced a reminders feature during its Townhall event on Sunday as well at the start of its external Android testing. The two platforms, it seems, could soon be neck-and-neck in terms of feature set.

Image Credits: Twitter

But while Clubhouse recently launched in-app donations feature as a means of supporting favorite creators, Twitter will soon introduce a more traditional means of generating revenue from live events: selling tickets. The company says it’s working on a feature that will allow hosts to set ticket prices and how many are available to a given event, in order to give them a way of earning revenue from their Twitter Spaces.

A limited group of testers will gain access to Ticketed Spaces in the coming months, Twitter says. Unlike Clubhouse, which has yet to tap into creator revenue streams, Twitter will take a small cut from these ticket sales. However, it notes that the “majority” of the revenue will go to the creators themselves.

Image Credits: Twitter

Twitter also noted that it’s improving its accessibility feature, live captions, so they can be paused and customized, and is working to make them more accurate.

The company will be hosting a Twitter Space of its own today around 1 PM PT to further discuss these announcements in more detail.

News: As companies prioritize diversity, startups are trying to productize diverse hiring

• May 3, 2021
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When the iconic American power tools company Stanley Black & Decker began looking for ways to improve the pipeline of diverse candidates that the company was reviewing for potential roles, it turned to an Israeli-based startup called Talenya for help. The company wasn’t alone in looking to startups for support in new hiring initiatives. Last

When the iconic American power tools company Stanley Black & Decker began looking for ways to improve the pipeline of diverse candidates that the company was reviewing for potential roles, it turned to an Israeli-based startup called Talenya for help.

The company wasn’t alone in looking to startups for support in new hiring initiatives. Last year’s social reckoning that occurred in the wake of nationwide protests against systemic racism triggered by the murder of George Floyd pushed companies around the country to reassess their own role in perpetuating inequality.

As part of that assessment, companies came to the realization that the hiring tools they’d been using to simplify the process of recruiting, cultivating and promoting talent weren’t capturing the broadest and most capable applicants.

“If we want to claim that it’s a pipeline issue, we would first have to claim that we’ve hired what is available in the pipeline,” Uber Chief Diversity Officer Bo Young Lee told TechCrunch. “It’s not a pipeline issue as much as it is a recruiting process challenge.”

That’s where tools like Talenya, Textio, TalVista, WayUp, Handshake, The Mom Project, Flockjay, Kanarys, JumpStart and SeekOut have come in. All told, these companies have raised more than $200 million in financing over the past few years to increase diversity and inclusion and help solve tech’s diversity problem.

“Part of our diversity, inclusion and belonging strategy focuses on having a diverse pipeline to ensure incoming talent better reflects the markets and communities we serve. To accelerate our progress, we started using Talenya’s AI software in 2020 to help increase the candidate pool of women and people of color,” said Suzan Morno-Wade, EVP and chief human resources officer at Xerox, another company using Talenya’s software, in a statement.

It seems that women and people of color use fewer keywords and are less effusive when they describe themselves in profiles or on job applications, according to a recent study published by Talenya.

That’s why startups like Talenya and Textio try to highlight how to improve the screening process for candidates by using broader language in both the text of the job description (Textio) and in the filters used to select qualified candidates (Talenya).

“Keyword search is highly discriminatory to everyone,” said Talenya chief executive and co-founder Gal Almog. “Minorities and women tend to put 20% to 30% less skills on their profiles. That applies not only to women and to minorities. We added an algorithm that can predict and add missing skills.”

In some ways, that functionality seems a lot like tools on offer from companies like SeekOut, the recruiting startup that just landed a whopping $65 million round from investors including Tiger Global, Madrona Group and Mayfield.

“The focus on diversity hiring and our unique approach to finding the talent and offering blind hiring features has super charged the adoption,” chief executive Anoop Gupta said in an interview earlier this year. That same toolkit is something that Talenya pitches its own customers.

Meanwhile, businesses like WayUp are attempting to give employers a window into how the funnel narrows after the screening process. The company’s new tool provides an assessment for how diverse applicant pools are slowly winnowed down to a group of candidates that is far less diverse through the testing process.

WayUp co-founder and chief executive Liz Wessel said that the pool of applicants often narrows significantly after a battery of technical assessment and programming tests.

“Similar to the SATs, many technical assessments have high correlation to socioeconomics status,” Wessel told TechCrunch.

While some startups focus on the hiring process itself, other companies are taking approaches to diversify-specific jobs or to try to recruit from particular talent pools to help increase diversity in the tech industry.

That’s the mission that companies like Flockjay and The Mom Project have set for themselves.

“Most people don’t even know that a job in tech sales is even a possibility,” Shaan Hathiramani, the founder and chief executive of Flockjay, a company offering a tech sales training curriculum to the masses, said earlier this year.

Hathiramani said his startup could be an on-ramp to the tech industry for legions of workers who have the skill sets to work in tech, but lack the network to see themselves in the business. Just like coding bootcamps have enabled thousands to get jobs as programmers in the tech business, Flockjay helps talented people who had never considered a job in tech get into the industry.

It’s a way for non-coders to leverage soft-skills they’d developed in other industries, including retail and food services, to jump into the higher paid world of tech companies. And it’s a way for those tech companies to find a more diverse pool of workers who can bring different skill sets and perspectives to the table.

A few hundred students have gone through the program so far, Hathiramani said, and the goal is to train 1,000 people over the course of 2021. The average income of a student before they go through Flockjay’s training program is $30,000 to $35,000 typically, Hathiramani said.

Upon graduation, those students can expect to make between $75,000 and $85,000, he said.

It’s obvious that tech needs to “do better” on inclusion, and The Mom Project — a Chicago startup that focuses on connecting women, including parents, with jobs from organizations specifically open to employing people who meet that profile — is one company tackling an aspect of the problem that’s become acute in the pandemic.

“Sixty percent of the job losses in the pandemic have been women, and the statistics have been even worse for women of color,” said Mom Project chief executive Allison Robinson. “It’s like a canary in the coal mine.”

While The Mom Project doesn’t have any tools today to surface candidates that meet more diverse profiles on that front, Robinson told TechCrunch that they are considering it and how to approach that in a way that works.

Ultimately these are considerations that matter for companies of any size, according to Bain Capital Ventures managing director, Sarah Smith.

“No matter what, it’s important that from day one [that] you have an eye on how to build an inclusive culture, where in an ideal world, even that first person you’re bringing onto the team could walk in and feel fairly welcomed. And… you really want people to bring their best selves and they bring their perspectives and their ideas,” Smith told the audience at TechCrunch’s Early Stage Conference. “I think it’s pretty common that a team might grow to like four or five from within the network, including the founders, [but] I think once you get to like number six, if you don’t have some type of gender or racial diversity yet… it’s gonna start to get really tough.”