Category: Tech news

Hair loss resulting from chemotherapy is one of the most recognizable side effects in all of medicine, and for many is an unwanted public announcement of their condition and treatment. Luminate Medical may have a solution in a medical wearable that prevents the chemical cocktail from tainting hair follicles, preventing the worst of the loss and perhaps relegating this highly visible condition to the past.

When Luminate CEO Aaron Hannon and his co-founder Bárbara Oliveira were asking patients and doctors about areas of cancer treatment that they could perhaps innovate in, “we were just astonished at how much hair loss dominated the conversation,” said Hannon. “So from then on out we’ve just been laser focused on making that something that doesn’t exist any more.”

When a patient is undergoing chemotherapy, the cancer-inhibiting drugs course through their entire body — anywhere the blood goes. This has a variety of side effects, like weakness and nausea, and on a longer time scale hair loss occurs as the substances affect the follicles. Luminate’s solution, developed in partnership with the National University of Ireland Galway, is to prevent the blood from reaching those cells in the first place.

The device that effects this is a sort of mechanized compression garment for the head. If that sounds a bit sinister, don’t worry — it uses only soft materials to achieve the pressure; Hannon says that it isn’t uncomfortable and pressure is carefully monitored.

There’s also no risk of damage from lack of blood flow in those cells. “Compression therapy has been really well studied,” he said. “There are years of literature around how long you can apply these therapies without damaging the cells. There’s a certain amount of mechanical engineering involved in making it both comfortable and effective.”

The patient wears the cap during and after the whole chemo session. By restricting blood flow to the skin of the scalp only, it allows the drugs to flow unimpeded to wherever the tumor or cancer site is while saving the hair follicles from damage.

Tests have been done on animals, which saw strong hair retention of around 80% with no adverse effects — and while full human trials are something that will need some time and approval to set up, initial tests of the headset’s bloodflow-blocking effects on healthy patients showed that it works exactly as expected on people as well.

“We’re really excited about the efficacy of this therapy because it works with lots of hair types,” said Hannon. That’s a real consideration, since a tech that only worked with short hair, straight hair or some other subset of hairstyles would exclude far too many people.

As for competition, although there are some new treatments that cool the scalp instead of compressing it, Hannon noted that the most money is spent by far on wigs. An average of a thousand dollars per patient who opts for a wig means there’s considerable leeway for a device in that neighborhood.

Although hair loss is considered a medical condition by many insurance companies and other methods of reimbursement, and wigs are often covered, it will take time and lots of evidence to get Luminate’s device approved for those processes. But the team is confident that at around $1,500, the device is within the means of many as long as other costs are being picked up by insurance. People do, after all, spend that much and more not just on wigs but on other hair retention products and methods. If there was a checkbox for “don’t lose hair” on the chemo forms with a $1,500 price tag, a whole lot of people would check it without a second thought.

Ultimately, however, Luminate wants to be able to offer the device also to those who can’t afford the cost out of pocket, so they are progressing toward FDA approval and a U.S. launch, with Europe and others to come.

So far Luminate, just graduating from Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch, has been lucky enough to operate on funds provided through grants from the Irish government, which are of course non-dilutive. While more capital will almost certainly be required come time for scaling and international launch, right now the team is focused on getting the device into the hands (and onto the heads) of its first set of patients.

TikTok parent company ByteDance seems to be looking to one-up Facebook anywhere it can. After taking over the mantle of most-downloaded social media app in the world with TikTok, ByteDance is coming for Facebook’s moonshot, buying up its own virtual reality headset maker called Pico.

The deal first reported on by Bloomberg last week was confirmed by the company on Monday, though ByteDance didn’t disclose a price tag for the deal. Pico had raised some $62 million in venture funding from Chinese firms, including a $37 million Series B in March. Like Oculus, they create both hardware and software for their VR devices. Unlike Oculus, they have a substantial presence in China. Pico may not hold the same name recognition as Oculus or HTC, but the company is a top VR hardware maker, selling to consumer audiences in China and enterprise customers in the Western world.

With Pico finding its home now at ByteDance, two of the world’s largest virtual reality brands now reside inside social media companies. Ironically, many of the company’s North American customers I’ve chatted with over the years seem to have at least partially opted for Pico headsets over Oculus hardware due to general weariness of Facebook’s data and ads-dependent business models, which they fear Oculus will eventually become a larger part of.

It’s no secret that the virtual reality market has been slow out of the gate, but Facebook has blazed the trail for the technology, dumping billions of dollars into an ecosystem that traditional investors have largely seemed uninterested in, in recent years.

Without knowing broad terms of the deal (I’m asking around), it’s hard to determine whether this is a moment of resurgence for VR or another sign of a contracting market. What seems most likely to me is that ByteDance is indeed interested in building out a consumer VR brand and is aiming to follow in Facebook’s footsteps closely while learning from their missteps and capitalizing on their contributions to the ecosystem. Whether the company solely focuses on the consumer markets in China or loosely pursues enterprise clients stateside as well is a big question ByteDance will have to address.

In a bid to expand its classical music offering, Apple today announced that it has acquired Primephonic. The Amsterdam-based service, which launched in 2014, will bring a laser focus on a music genre that’s been sorely lacking in Apple Music’s generalized approach to streaming.

The service will effectively be discontinued as a standalone offering as it’s absorbed into the broader Apple Music platform. On September 7, Primephonic will shut down for good, while Apple readies the 2022 launch of a classical music app based on its own streaming service.

“Artists love the Primephonic service and what we’ve done in classical, and now we have the ability to join with Apple to deliver the absolute best experience to millions of listeners,” Primephonic co-founder and CEO Thomas Steffens said in a release issued by Apple. “We get to bring classical music to the mainstream and connect a new generation of musicians with the next generation of audience.”

According to an interview with Primephonic’s CTO published last year, the service has launched in 150 countries. It also appears to have an older demographic than more generalized streaming services.

“Most of our users are age 55 plus and are highly educated and relatively well off,” Henrique Boregio told Mixpanel in 2020. “We joke in the office that we don’t know whether you start liking classical music and then you become wealthy, or if it’s the other way around.”

Apple notes of the upcoming offering, “Apple Music Classical fans will get a dedicated experience with the best features of Primephonic, including better browsing and search capabilities by composer and by repertoire, detailed displays of classical music metadata, plus new features and benefits.”

While the new classical service is being built out, the company is offering an olive branch to existing Primephonic users in the form of six free months of Apple Music.

Instagram will begin prodding users to share their birthday with the service, if they haven’t already done so. The company today announced it will now start popping up a notification that asks you to add your birthday to “personalize your experience.” But the prompt can only be dismissed a handful of times before becoming a requirement. The move is a part of Instagram’s larger goal to create new safety features aimed at younger users, the company explains. This includes the teen privacy protections introduced earlier this year, as well as Instagram’s longer-term plan to launch a version of its service aimed at users under the age of 13.

This March, Instagram rolled out new features that made it more difficult for adults to contact teens through its app. Then in July, the company announced a larger series of changes to the default settings for new users under the age of 16. It will now default these users’ accounts to “private” and limit their accounts from being suggested elsewhere in the app. It also now restricts adults whose accounts are flagged as “potentially suspicious” from being able to reach out to other minors or interact with their posts.

Starting this week, Instagram says users who have not yet shared their birthday will begin to see pop-up notifications when they open the Instagram app.

These notifications will appear a handful of times, but at some point, users will no longer be able to dismiss the message by tapping “Not Now.” Instead, everyone will ultimately be required to share their birthday to continue to use Instagram.

The company will also now request you to share your birthday information when you come across a post with a warning screen. These screens, which hide content that’s flagged as sensitive or graphic, are not new. But Instagram has never before asked for a user’s birthday before displaying the hidden content.

The birthday entry form itself is not complex. You simply scroll to choose the month, day and year of your birthday.

Of course, kids are commonly known to lie on these entry forms in order to bypass restrictions when signing up for apps. On this front, Instagram has developed AI technology to help it identify accounts were kids may have lied. For instance, it may be able to infer someone’s birthday based on comments left on “Happy Birthday” posts, where the user’s age may be referenced. The company also hints at further plans in this area, noting how it will later require users to verify their age when Facebook’s technology determines a mismatch between the age the user submitted and what appears to be their real age, based on other signals.

That technology is still in the “early stages,” says Instagram, but will involve a menu of options that will allow someone to verify their age.

The need to have users’ birthdays on hand isn’t only meant to power the recently launched teen protection features. Instagram is also working to bring its app to younger users — a decision that’s been met with a hostile response from legislators and consumer advocacy groups alike. In addition, age remains an important data point for ad targeting. Even as Instagram pulled back on the ability for marketers to target teens using interest data or their activity on other apps, it will continue to allow ad targeting based on age, gender and location across age groups.

The company is now one of several to have rolled out added protections for younger teen users, ahead of regulations that would force them to do so. Over the course of this year, TikTok, YouTube and Google have also announced changes to how younger teens can use their services and how they can be targeted by ads, in anticipation of a regulatory crackdown. While each has crafted its own set of teen safety features independently, the changes have largely addressed making the default settings for new teenage users more restrictive.

Instagram says the new birthday pop-up notifications will begin to appear this week on the mobile app and will continue to roll out over the weeks ahead to reach more users.

Less than two weeks after its official launch, The Boring Company’s Loop system in Las Vegas had its first security breach.

On June 21, the morning of the final day of the International Beauty Show, an “unauthorized vehicle” joined the system’s fleet of Tesla taxis underground, emails between the Loop’s operations manager and a Clark County official show. The emails were obtained by TechCrunch under public records laws.

The emails provide new insight into the operations of the Loop beyond the intrusion, including the system’s surprising reliance on a non-Tesla electric vehicle, plans to allow Tesla vehicles to use its Autopilot driver assistance system and confirmation within company ranks that the technology is not autonomous.

The Boring Company (TBC) called the Las Vegas Metro Police to handle the intrusion. “The driver of the unauthorized vehicle was cooperative and eventually escorted out of the system,” reads one email.

While there were no injuries or fatalities as a result of the security breach, the incident could be embarrassing for TBC, which has touted the security and safety of its $53 million system to the LVCC.

According to a management agreement between TBC and the LVCC, the system is supposed to have “physical barriers [to] guard against entry of accidental, rogue, or otherwise unauthorized vehicles into the tunnels.” These include security gates on roadways into the system, and dozens of concrete bollards surrounding its ground-level stations.

Neither TBC nor LVCC responded to inquiries about the incident. TechCrunch will update the article if either party responds to questions.

Autopilot gets a chance

The emails obtained by TechCrunch provide more than the exploits of a thrill-seeking trespasser.

The emails also detail plans by TBC to increase the number of Tesla vehicles in the LVCC Loop from 62 to 70, and to allow the use of Tesla Autopilot technologies. Until now, TBC has had to disable all driver assistance technologies on its vehicles, which are operated by human drivers.

The new scope of operations will require the use of seven active safety technologies — automatic emergency braking, front and side collision warnings, obstacle-aware acceleration, blind-spot monitoring, lane departure avoidance, emergency lane departure warning as well as two “full Autopilot” technologies: lane centering and traffic aware cruise control.

TBC’s justification for using Autopilot was set out in a letter to the Clark County Department of Building & Fire Prevention in June, obtained by TechCrunch along with the emails.

TBC president Steve Davis wrote that disabling the features “actively removes a layer of safety,” from a “proven, road-legal technology.” Davis quoted Tesla’s Safety Report for the first quarter of 2021 that claims Tesla drivers operating with Autopilot experienced crashes at less than a quarter the rate of Tesla drivers operating without Autopilot or active safety features, per mile driven. “As demonstrated… disabling these features in Tesla vehicles increases the likelihood of an accident,” wrote Davis.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), however, last week opened a formal safety probe into the technology, following a number of crashes.

Jerry Stueve, the director of the building and fire protection in Clark County, replied in an email: “We will take this under consideration, although it may help in our evaluation of this request if you can better define the term ‘autodrive’ and what it entails.”

“Agreed that the term ‘Autopilot’ is often unclear and can mean many different things depending on the vehicle and scenario,” replied Davis. (In this, he apparently disagrees with his boss, Elon Musk, who has called criticism of the Autopilot name as misleading “idiotic.”)

“These are not ‘autonomous’ nor ‘self-driving’ vehicles,” continued Davis. “The use of Tesla Autopilot and active safety features adds additional layers of safety while operating the vehicle, however the use of the features still requires a fully attentive driver who is ready to take over the wheel at any moment.”

Autopilot versus autonomous driving

This distinction is key, as it appears to contradict what TBC has promised LVCC since it first pitched the Loop system. In its land use application in May 2019, prior to signing the construction construct, TBC wrote: “Tesla Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) will carry passengers in express, underground tunnels to three underground stations.”

A planning document in July 2019 stated: “Utilizing autonomous electric vehicles in underground tunnels is a unique transportation solution that will minimize disruptions and conflicts to existing buildings and transportation systems.” It has used similar language in applications ever since, including for a proposed Vegas-wide Loop with dozens of stations.

In January, TechCrunch obtained a management agreement between LVCC and TBC that stated: “[The LVCC] procured the People Mover System, in part, because of the ability for People Mover System vehicles to operate autonomously … The Agreement recognizes the intent for the System to move from drivers in the vehicles to autonomous operations and provides for a fee renegotiation, no later than December 31 2021, incorporating this expected transition in operations.”

That deadline now seems almost certain to be missed. In June, Stueve told Davis: “As stated early in the project, the approval of autonomous operation will require extensive scrutiny, testing and validation. This process could take a significant amount of time.”

In reply, Davis wrote: “I want to make sure that it is clear that we are not asking for autonomous or self-driving features/operations.”

Humans in the Loop

The problem is two-fold. One is that Tesla’s Autopilot system may not be able to operate completely without a driver for some time to come. The second, arguably more serious, challenge is that the Loop is heavily reliant on its drivers to meet the safety requirements for underground transportation systems, laid out in national standards. Passengers of such systems, whether monorails, subways or using electric cars, must be safe in the event of power outages, fires, floods and other emergencies.

The LVCC Loop’s basis of design document, obtained by TechCrunch along with the emails, states: “[Our] trained drivers serve as the system’s key layer of safety. In the event of an emergency, actions taken by drivers to direct passengers in the proper and safe directions are the primary risk mitigating responses.”

Other documents obtained by TechCrunch from BFP confirm this. In the case of fire, the driver will “assist with deboarding passengers, and guide passengers on foot to the closest exit. Driver issues verbal instructions and may physically assist passengers.” As the driver leads passengers by walking ahead of them, they must “consistently look back to ensure every passenger is following closely behind.”

Drivers are responsible for assessing and responding to unruly or misbehaving passengers, and, in fact, for supervising the performance of the Autopilot itself, says TBC. “The [Loop] will have drivers, ensuring that there is always someone overseeing the use of active safety features who is ready to take over braking and steering as needed,” wrote Davis in June.

None of the dozens of documents or hundreds of emails obtained by TechCrunch, including those detailing the LVCC Loop’s future expansion, describe a path or timetable for TBC to move toward fully autonomous operation.

In response to a questionnaire on how the Loop will meet the American Society of Civil Engineers’ safety principles for autonomous systems, TBC responded: “Criteria specific to autonomous operation are not applicable to the [LVCC Loop], as the system will have drivers to operate vehicles.”

Only time will tell whether what TBC is telling Clark County, or what it is telling LVCC, is closer to how the Loop will operate in the future.

In the meantime, if the Loop vehicles are not yet driverless, can the LVCC at least expect them all to be the latest Tesla models? Perhaps not.

Another requirement for the Loop is that it complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In an email to Clark County officials in July, a TBC executive noted that it was going to buy a non-Tesla ADA electric vehicle for the LVCC Loop.

Although the email did not specify the model, it has a low-range lead-acid battery with the same specification as the Tropos Motors Able electric utility vehicle. Neither Tropos nor TBC responded to inquiries.

One of the consequences of rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere is that levels also rise proportionately in the ocean, harming wildlife and changing ecosystems. Heimdal is a startup working to pull that CO2 back out at scale using renewable energy and producing carbon-negative industrial materials, including limestone for making concrete, in the process, and it has attracted significant funding even at its very early stage.

If the concrete aspect seems like a bit of a non sequitur, consider two facts: concrete manufacturing is estimated to produce as much as 8% OF all greenhouse gas emissions, and seawater is full of minerals used to make it. You probably wouldn’t make this connection unless you were in some related industry or discipline, but Heimdal founders Erik Millar and Marcus Lima did while they were working in their respective masters programs at Oxford. “We came out and did this straight away,” he said.

They both firmly believe that climate change is an existential threat to humanity, but were disappointed at the lack of permanent solutions to its many and various consequences across the globe. Carbon capture, Millar noted, is frequently a circular process, meaning it is captured only to be used and emitted again. Better than producing new carbons, sure, but why aren’t there more ways to permanently take them out of the ecosystem?

The two founders envisioned a new linear process that takes nothing but electricity and CO2-heavy seawater and produces useful materials that permanently sequester the gas. Of course, if it was as easy that, everyone would already be doing it.

“The carbon markets to make this economically viable have only just been formed,” said Millar. And the cost of energy has dropped through the floor as huge solar and wind installations have overturned decades-old power economies. With carbon credits (the market for which I will not be exploring, but suffice it to say it is an enabler) and cheap power come new business models, and Heimdal’s is one of them.

The Heimdal process, which has been demonstrated at lab scale (think terrariums instead of thousand-gallon tanks), is roughly as follows. First the seawater is alkalinized, shifting its pH up and allowing the isolation of some gaseous hydrogen, chlorine and a hydroxide sorbent. This is mixed with a separate stream of seawater, causing the precipitation of calcium, magnesium and sodium minerals and reducing the saturation of CO2 in the water — allowing it to absorb more from the atmosphere when it is returned to the sea. (I was shown an image of the small-scale prototype facility but, citing pending patents, Heimdal declined to provide the photo for publication.)

So from seawater and electricity, they produce hydrogen and chlorine gas, calcium carbonate, sodium carbonate and magnesium carbonate, and in the process sequester a great deal of dissolved CO2.

For every kiloton of seawater, one ton of CO2 is isolated, and two tons of the carbonates, each of which has an industrial use. MgCO3 and Na2CO3 are used in, among other things, glass manufacturing, but it’s CaCO3, or limestone, that has the biggest potential impact.

As a major component of the cement-making process, limestone is always in great demand. But current methods for supplying it are huge sources of atmospheric carbon. All over the world industries are investing in carbon reduction strategies, and while purely financial offsets are common, moving forward the preferred alternative will likely be actually carbon-negative processes.

To further stack the deck in its favor, Heimdal is looking to work with desalination plants, which are common around the world where fresh water is scarce but seawater and energy are abundant, for example the coasts of California and Texas in the U.S., and many other areas globally, but especially where deserts meet the sea, like in the MENA region.

Desalination produces fresh water and proportionately saltier brine, which generally has to be treated, as to simply pour it back into the ocean can throw the local ecosystem out of balance. But what if there were, say, a mineral-collecting process between the plant and the sea? Heimdal gets the benefit of more minerals per ton of water, and the desalination plant has an effective way of handling its salty byproduct.

“Heimdal’s ability to use brine effluent to produce carbon-neutral cement solves two problems at once,” said Yishan Wong, former Reddit CEO, now CEO of Terraformation and individually an investor in Heimdal. “It creates a scalable source of carbon-neutral cement, and converts the brine effluent of desalination into a useful economic product. Being able to scale this together is game-changing on multiple levels.”

Terraformation is a big proponent of solar desalination, and Heimdal fits right into that equation; the two are working on an official partnership that should be announced shortly. Meanwhile a carbon-negative source for limestone is something cement makers will buy every gram of in their efforts to decarbonize.

Wong points out that the primary cost of Heimdal’s business, beyond the initial ones of buying tanks, pumps and so on, is that of solar energy. That’s been trending downwards for years and with huge sums being invested regularly there’s no reason to think that the cost won’t continue to drop. And profit per ton of CO2 captured — already around 75% of over $500-$600 in revenue — could also grow with scale and efficiency.

Millar said that the price of their limestone is, when government incentives and subsidies are included, already at price parity with industry norms. But as energy costs drop and scales rise, the ratio will grow more attractive. It’s also nice that their product is indistinguishable from “natural” limestone. “We don’t require any retrofitting for the concrete providers — they just buy our synthetic calcium carbonate rather than buy it from mining companies,” he explained.

All in all it seems to make for a promising investment, and though Heimdal has not yet made its public debut (that would be forthcoming at Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day) it has attracted a $6.4 million seed round. The participating investors are Liquid2 Ventures, Apollo Projects, Soma Capital, Marc Benioff, Broom Ventures, Metaplanet, Cathexis Ventures and, as mentioned above, Yishan Wong.

Heimdal has already signed LOIs with several large cement and glass manufacturers, and is planning its first pilot facility at a U.S. desalination plant. After providing test products to its partners on the scale of tens of tons, they plan to enter commercial production in 2023.

Welcome back to IPO season.

No, we won’t call it hot liquidity summer, but after an August lull, the public-offering cycle is back upon us. Last week we saw filings from Warby Parker, Toast and Freshworks. We’ve dug into Warby already. This week, we’re tackling the details of the latter two debuts, starting with Toast.

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Why do we care about Toast? It’s a technology startup. It’s a unicorn. And it raised more than $900 million while private, per Crunchbase data. And the company is a leading constituent of the Boston startup scene.

Even more, the software-and-payments company combines subscription incomes, transaction fees, hardware revenues and lending earnings. Its business is complex — in a good way — and may help us better understand what happens to software companies when they build more financial capabilities into their original applications.

It’s an interesting company, one that was initially impacted heavily by the COVID-19 pandemic. Let’s go over the company’s overall financial performance, dig into how COVID affected the company’s business, consider how its revenue mix is changing over time, discuss how important fintech incomes are for the company and what it might be worth. This will be good fun. Let’s go!

Toast’s growth is accelerating

We’ll carve more deeply into how the company generates revenues shortly. For now, just keep in mind that the company has a number of revenue streams, each of which has a different gross-margin profile. So, we’re not only discussing high-margin software revenues in the following.

Here’s Toast’s top-line performance for 2019, 2020, and the first half of both 2020 and 2021, taken from its S-1 filing:

We can quickly see that the company grew from 2019 to 2020, albeit at a moderate clip. More recently, observing the two columns on the far right, we can see much more rapid growth from the company. In year-on-year comparative terms, Toast grew 24% in 2020 and 105% in the first half of 2021.

Thinking about how COVID-19 hit the food business, observing modest growth at the company in 2020 feels somewhat strong; despite huge market chop, Toast still grew nicely. And the company’s H1 2021 results indicate that the product work that Toast engaged in during the global pandemic has worked well, allowing it to accelerate growth by a factor of four in the last two quarters when compared to 2020’s overall pace of revenue expansion.

The above data also helps us better understand why Toast is going public now. After pushing through 2020, the company’s current portrait is one of accelerating growth leading to massive top-line accretion. Toast looks more than strong. And there’s no better time to go public than when you have numbers to brag about.

The venture world is — quite literally — waking up to the potential of applying artificial intelligence to a wider variety of real-world, consumer-driven problems, and today comes the latest development on that front: Eight Sleep, which makes “smart” mattresses and mattress covers (for regular mattresses) that use machine learning and other artificial intelligence-based algorithms to improve your sleep both by changing temperature and monitoring other physical parameters to provide an overall picture of your health, has raised $86 million in a Series C round of funding.

Valor Equity Partners — the firm that has backed the likes of Tesla, SpaceX, GoPuff and many other big tech firms — is leading this latest investment, with SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and General Catalyst also participating, along with a lot of high-profile individuals who are also users of the product: athletes Alex Rodriguez, Kris Bryant and J.D. Martinez; celebs Kevin Hart; and tech figures Sophia Amoruso, Naval Ravikant and Kyle Vogt.

This Series C brings the total raised by Eight Sleep to $150 million, and the startup has confirmed to me that its valuation is now close to $500 million.

Matteo Franceschetti, Eight Sleep’s CEO, said in an interview that the funding will be used in a few ways.

First, the plan is to double down on building out more technology. Today, Eight’s Pod technology can detect your temperature, heartbeat and breathing and heat or cool a bed accordingly. Tomorrow, that could also include more physical products, additional ambient factors like lighting, and other diagnostics related to you, the sleeper.

Second, Eight Sleep wants to expand internationally, with plans to sell New York-based Eight Sleep products across Europe and the U.K. by the end of this year. After all, it’s not just people in the U.S. who could use a better night of sleep.

Franceschetti — who co-founded the company with Massimo Andreasi Bassi, Andrea Ballarini and Alexandra Zatarain — told TechCrunch that he came to think about sleep and the need to improve it by way of having been an avid and active sports enthusiast.

“I was into the idea of sleep as recovery,” he said. “That is how we came up with the idea of sleep fitness.” Sleep he said, “is not just a waste of time.” Extrapolating that, it’s not just important for athletes, but everyone, to have better-quality sleep.

“The vision for us is to compress your sleep and save your life,” he said. A good six hours, he added, “are better than eight hours that are not.” The company’s original name, Eight, was in reference to those fabled eight hours. Eight Sleep claims that when people use its products, they fall asleep 40% faster, get up to 20% more deep sleep and experience 30% fewer mid-night wake-ups and up to 30% fewer tosses and turns.

(But can it get me to stop worrying about COVID, the economy and societal collapse, whether my kids will be happy in life, and if we remembered to lock the door downstairs? Or maybe all of those just seem less serious when you are actually comfortable in bed…)

While Eight has definitely had a lot of traction with athletes — some 100 stars use it today — it’s hoping that the big boom in quantified self technology — hardware and software built to measure our blood pressure, heart rate, how much we sleep, how much we walk or do other activities, and much more — will mean that it can ultimately have a mass market appeal.

Indeed, that we are living in a world with wearable tech that tracks our every movement is nothing new. And, as computing and communications technologies have become smaller and more portable, and infinitely more powerful, and cloud technology and advances in big data analytics has made the gathering of data and the ability to parse it more sophisticated, we have only seen the possibilities for how that can be used to measure (and potentially “improve”) our lives increase.

Within that, sleep has been a large category of opportunity both for startups and tech companies. Earlier this year, Oura raised $100 million for its fitness and sleep tracking rings; others like Zeit have been exploring how to use wearable technology to address more acute sleep-related issues like sleep strokes.

Larger tech companies are not asleep at the wheel, either. Google recently updated its Nest Hub to track sleep; and even Apple has acquired a sleep tech company, Beddit (that deal was back in 2017, however, and it has been years since that hardware was updated: that could be one sign that Apple was more interested in using some of the technology in some of its other health-related efforts).

All this points to many more developments in a sleep tech market estimated to be worth around $30 billion. Within that, Eight Sleep has been on a roll, with revenues for 2021 currently on track to triple versus 2020 on the back of two main products, a mattress that retails for nearly $3,000 for its smallest size, a queen, and a smart cover that starts at $1,720. (The company does not disclose user numbers, but Franceschetti said that the figures are in the “several thousands.”)

“The sleep tech market is only in its infancy. The opportunity is limitless, as we spend up to a third of our lives asleep. Consumers are increasingly focused on sleep fitness as the understanding of how deeply important sleep is to overall health becomes more widely known,” said Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity in a statement.

Gracias founded Valor and is joining the board with this round, and as with other investors, he seems to have been won over in part by becoming a user: “The first night I slept on the Pod I knew we had to get involved,” he said. “We’ve seen this in our portfolio many times – Eight Sleep’s products and technology are disrupting the sleep market, and its rapid innovation is outpacing the competition as it builds a new sleep fitness focused category that delivers results.”

Ryan Reynolds is America’s sweetheart, despite being both Canadian and somewhat irreverent. The actor, producer, screenwriter and entrepreneur has been nominated for a Golden Globe and Grammy for his work on the Deadpool franchise.

But it wasn’t just his acting that made Deadpool a record-breaking, billion-dollar franchise. Reynolds is one of the world’s greatest when it comes to fast-vertising, which he’s leveraged into his production company and marketing firm Maximum Effort, which ran some of the cheapest, and most impactful marketing for Deadpool from the start.

Maximum Effort is also responsible for some of the best ads of the past few years. It would be hard to forget his campaigns for Aviation Gin (remember how quickly he turned a terrible Peloton ad into an hilarious Aviation Gin ad) or the devilishly funny Match.com spot.

His creative chops are impressive, but come with some clever entrepreneurial grit. Reynolds is an owner of Aviation Gin, which sold for more than $600 million in 2020, and an owner of Mint Mobile, a fast-growing MVNO. Reynolds has brought his marketing expertise to Mint Mobile, too, without becoming the joke.

Obviously, we’re thrilled to have him join us at Disrupt (Sept 21-23) for a fireside chat to talk about how he leverages both his creativity and his platform in the world of entrepreneurialism, and pick his brain on how startups can use fast-vertising to have a maximum impact on a minimum budget.

We’ll also get a feel for his investment appetite in the world of startups.

Reynolds joins a whole host of amazing speakers at Disrupt, including Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, investor Chamath Palihapitiya, Calendly CEO Tope Awotona, and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. Get your ticket now for under $100 for a limited time!

What does a company have to do to differentiate wireless earbuds in 2021? The near ubiquity of good hardware has made this an increasingly difficult question to answer. I’ve probably tested around 10 different sets of buds over the last year or so, and honestly, they were all pretty good.

Companies like Nura and Nothing are taking interesting approaches to the category, but for hardware makers who also sell their own handsets, sometimes being the best pair of headphones for a specific mobile device is enough.

OnePlus is in something of a void between the two worlds. The company makes its own phones, of course, but doesn’t pull in numbers approaching goliaths like Samsung and Apple. Fittingly, the OnePlus Buds Pro walk that line — serving as a solid pair of buds that play nicely with its own devices, while sprinkling in a few — at the very least — interesting additions that somewhat differentiate them from a crowded field.

OnePlus’s work in the category has been — to this point — unexceptional at best, and downright lackluster at worst. I was very much unimpressed when the company finally entered the fully wireless category last year, after a tethered play in the space. The sub-$100 price point was nice, but they otherwise felt like a set that could have flown maybe three or four years ago, when the pickings were far slimmer.

The Pros are, mercifully, better in practically every respect. That has to be a bit of a relief for the company, as one of its co-founders launched his own new headphones within a month of their product. At $150, the product comes in at a $50 premium over both the Ear (1) and its standard buds. It’s a fair price for what you’re getting here, however, taking a broader look at the current landscape.

I should note, that for this review, I took the headphones for a spin with a non-OnePlus Android phone I had handy, as well as an iPhone. That requires the use of the HeyMelody OnePlus/Oppo app, which is, in a word, lacking. But it gets the job done with some key features. There’s a fit test to ensure that you have a good seal, and OnePlus Audio ID, which helps you create a custom sound profile.

The latter is a rudimentary version of what Nura offers with an old-school sound test that runs you through a number of different tones, asking whether you can hear the playback. It’s a bit of a slog, but it ultimately makes a difference. The result was a fair bit fuller and richer when I finished. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of EQ customization beyond that. That said, I really don’t have a lot to complain about on the sound side of things, beyond an over reliance on bass.

The noise canceling, which can either be controlled on the app or via the headphones’ stems, is also effective. A long (three-second) click of the stems, meanwhile, will pop up one of the buds’ most unique features: Zen Mode Air. It’s a clever if unnecessary addition in an era when every tech company is thinking about mindfulness. The feature pipes white noise into your eyes. The default is “Warm Sunrise” — kind of a meadow soundscape with chirping birds and insects. There are four other preloaded sounds, including campfires and the beach. It’s not a feature I ever thought I’d need, but in year where everything is stressful basically all of the time, I kind of dig it.

On the design side, companies have one of two choices these days. You can either embrace the AirPod or try something defiantly different. It’s pretty clear with a glance which direction OnePlus went. It’s a bit less pronounced on the matte black pair the company sent for review, but the white versions are unmistakable. The metal stems appear to be tossed in so as to not make them infringingly close to the market leaders.

From a comfort perspective, they’re tough to beat. I’ve had them in for extended periods and gone running with them in and have no complaints. I guess there’s something to the AirPods design, after all. Battery life is pretty stellar, with five to seven hours on the buds (depending on ANC usage) and a combined 28 to 38 (ditto) with the slim case factored in. The case also supports wireless charging — an increasingly ubiquitous feature at this price point.

OnePlus clearly wanted to hew close to its budget roots by launching with the $99 buds first. But I think there’s something to the Google approach of showing what you can do with a more premium model and then dropping the budget take. There’s a strong case to be made that these were the headphones OnePlus should have released a year or two ago. But, hey, better late than never.

“There are three common blunders that most SaaS marketers make time and again when it comes to clarity and high-converting content,” says Konrad Sanders, founder and CEO of The Creative Copywriter, “1. Not differentiating from competitors. 2. Not humanizing ‘tech talk.’ 3. Not tuning their messaging to prospects’ stage of awareness at the appropriate stage of the funnel.”

In an oversaturated market, how can you differentiate yourself? This week in marketing, Sanders took the time to answer that, break down B2B SaaS marketing, and tell us how marketers can do it right. Anna Heim, Extra Crunch daily reporter, interviewed Robert Katai, a Romanian marketing expert, as part of our TechCrunch Experts series. If there’s a growth marketer that you think we should know about, fill out our survey and tell us why!

Marketer: One Net Inc.
Recommended by: The Good Ride
Testimonial: “Exceptional SEO expertise. My e-comm startup relies 100% on SEO traffic and three years ago we were delisted from Google because we didn’t understand about duple content. One Net fixed our site and optimized it for Google, which allowed us to get back into the SERPs. Bottom line is: They saved our business.”

Marketer: Natalia Bandach, Hypertry
Recommended by: Jean-Noel Saunier, Growth Hacking Course
Testimonial: “Natalia is someone with an out-of-the-box approach to growth drivers and experimentation, full of creative solutions and many ideas that she quickly tests through experimentation. Rather than focusing on one area, she tries to verify what makes the most sense to a business and designs experiments that are crucial not only short but also long term. She is an ethical growth manager, likes to know that the business brings real value and is ready to pivot in every direction, [which] she does fast, however, with a focus on the team’s well-being, professional growth and always avoiding burnout.”

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

Marketer: Avi Grondin, Variance Marketing
Recommended by: Adam Czach, Explorator Labs
Testimonial: “They have a hands-on approach and worked with my team to not only drive results, but educate us on how we can grow our company further.”

Marketer: Nate Dame, Profound Strategy
Recommended by: Amanda Valle, Adobe
Testimonial: “They offered a robust content research, management and writing platform, which is enabling us to manage, produce and collaborate around our content better.”

Marketer: Oren Greenberg, Kurve
Recommended by: Michael Lorenzos
Testimonial: “He’s the most well-versed growth marketer I’ve met with a wide range of expertise and an uncanny ability to zoom in and out for business context and tactical implementation.”

(Extra Crunch) Are B2B SaaS marketers getting it wrong?: Konrad Sanders, a content strategist in addition to being the founder and CEO at The Creative Copywriter, wrote about SaaS marketing for Extra Crunch. He dove into what SaaS marketers are getting wrong, how to stand out in the crowded industry and the importance of how to approach each section of your funnel. Sanders says, “By creating content for every stage of the funnel, you’ll address your prospects’ concerns at the appropriate point in the buyer journey and increase the chances that when they do come to make a purchase, it’s with you.”

Romanian marketing expert Robert Katai explains how to get the most out of your content: This week, Anna profiled Robert Katai. Katai told her all about Romania’s startup scene and his views on repurposing content. When speaking about using content for carousels on Instagram and LinkedIn, he says, “The first slide should grab attention — it can be a question. The second slide can be a link to the interview so that even if people don’t click it, it will be on their minds. Then you can have slides with insights.” Read the full interview to find out what the third slide should be!

Tell us who your favorite startup growth marketing expert to work with is by filling out our survey.

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.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, August 27, 2021. What a week! In the last 24 hours we’ve had big news from around the world, including China’s latest regulatory push, Apple making modest concessions regarding the App Store and, of course, startup news aplenty.

Oh, and Canva CEO Melanie Perkins is coming to Disrupt. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• China to crack down on algorithms: The push to more closely regulate and control China’s domestic technology market continued Friday with a government body announcing a draft set of rules for algorithms. The new rules come as China seeks to limit corporate data collection and more. Irony, of course, is dead.
• Corporations can’t get enough startup equity: That’s our takeaway from digging into the recent, record results from the corporate venture capital (CVC) world. CVCs are taking part in more, bigger startup funding rounds. We dug into the why and the how of the latest data.
• Apple makes smallest App Store concession: Per a settlement today, TechCrunch reports that Apple will now allow apps to “share information on how to pay for purchases outside of their iOS app or the App Store.” Apple called the change a clarification, which was interesting. Apple’s grip on the App Store is still tight, but we may be seeing indicators that its hold is slipping modestly.

Startups/VC

Up top, let’s talk about a16z, the venture capital conglomerate. Sure, it has crypto funds and main funds and other funds aplenty. But today the group announced a $400 million capital pool just for seed deals. The fund size indicates that a16z is either expecting to pay lots for seed equity or that it is going to make a host of bets. We’ll see.

• Rivian files to go public: In case you were looking for yet another EV company to add to your personal investments, good news! Rivian has filed privately to go public! Frankly, we’re excited by this deal; Lordstown this is not. The company recently closed $2.5 billion in external capital, bringing it to more than $10 billion in total. We want to know what all that funding has bought the firm in terms of results.
• Forbes is also going public: Via a SPAC, we should note, but yes, Forbes the media-and-magazine company is taking advantage of the boom in blank-check combinations to take itself public. We dug into its deck to see what the company has coming up and how heavily COVID-19 impacted its results.
• Toast is also going public, but your humble servant failed to get a post up on the matter by the time it was newsletter o’clock. More to come on TechCrunch.com.
• Payroll API startup Zeal raises Series A: The embedded fintech space is busy, and competitive, which makes what Zeal is building rather interesting. Is there a big enough market for just a payroll API product? A few years ago I would have quibbled, but if the OKR startup world has taught me anything, it’s to not underestimate how much demand there is in the world for software.
• Sitenna wants to help telcos place 5G antennas: Coming in the next batch of Y Combinator-backed startups, Sitenna is looking for a piece of the capital wave that will push 5G mobile connectivity into our lives. The startup is neat, so read the post, but also keep in mind that demo day for YC is next week, so we’re heading into a very heavy news cycle over the next few days.
• Sastrify raises $7M: Based in Cologne, Sastrify wants to help companies buy and manage their SaaS spend. Why does the world need this? Well, now that all software is a subscription fee, not overpaying and generally knowing what one is paying for is a big deal. And big deals plus some founder work equals a startup. Notably, Sastrify is already cash-flow-positive despite its youth.

The pre-pitch: 7 ways to build relationships with VCs

Many founders must overcome a few emotional hurdles before they’re comfortable pitching a potential investor face-to-face.

To alleviate that pressure, Unicorn Capital founder Evan Fisher recommends that entrepreneurs use pre-pitch meetings to build and strengthen relationships before asking for a check:

This is the ‘we actually aren’t looking for money; we just want to be friends for now’ pitch that gets you on an investor’s radar so that when it’s time to raise your next round, they’ll be far more likely to answer the phone because they actually know who you are.

Pre-pitches are good for more than curing the jitters: These conversations help founders get a better sense of how VCs think and sometimes lead to serendipitous outcomes.

“Investors are opportunists by necessity,” says Fisher, “so if they like the cut of your business’s jib, you never know — the FOMO might start kicking hard.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Peloton’s bad week: What happens when you have a lackluster earnings report — by Wall Street’s standards — and then get “subpoenaed by both the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security”? Well, your share price goes down, and you hope that Monday will wind up much better than how Friday went.
• Tesla wants to sell power: This is a fun one. Per an application, the world learned that Tesla wants to sell power in Texas under the rubric of being a retail electric provider, meaning that it may “purchase wholesale electricity from power generators and sell it to customers,” per TechCrunch.
• Twitter tried to bring back the old times: By having its service stutter and go down for folks today. Remember the good old times, when Twitter broke all the time? Personally, I miss the Fail Whale. Twitter, we reckon, does not.
• To close us out, Venky Adivi from Canonical has some thoughts on open source software and the U.S. government. Spoiler: The news is mostly good.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Marketer: Natalia Bandach, Hypertry

Recommended by: Jean-Noel Saunier, Growth Hacking Course

Testimonial: “Natalia is someone with an out-of-the-box approach to growth drivers and experimentation, full of creative solutions and many ideas that she quickly tests through experimentation. Rather than focusing on one area, she tries to verify what makes the most sense to a business and designs experiments that are crucial not only [in the short term] but also [in the long run]. She is an ethical growth manager, likes to know that the business brings real value, and is ready to pivot in every direction, [which] she does fast — however, with a focus on the team’s well-being, professional growth and always avoiding burnout.”

Community

Join Danny Crichton on Twitter Spaces on Tuesday, August 31st at 1 p.m. PDT/4 p.m. EDT as he talks with Azeem Azhar about his upcoming book, “The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society,” which will be released on September 7, 2021.

TikTok has banned the popular “milk crate challenge” from its platform due to concerns that users participating in the trend could be seriously injured. The challenge saw TikTok users stacking milk crates into a pyramid and then attempting to climb across the unstable structure.

A spokesperson from the company told TechCrunch in an email that “TikTok prohibits content that promotes or glorifies dangerous acts, and we remove videos and redirect searches to our Community Guidelines to discourage such content. We encourage everyone to exercise caution in their behavior whether online or off.”

In most videos depicting the trend, TikTok users are seen tumbling to the ground as they try to climb up one side of the makeshift pyramid and down the other. The ban comes after several healthcare workers took to social media to voice their concerns about the trend and the danger it poses to those participating in it.

Searching for the trend’s hashtag on the app now brings up a “no results found” notice. The search results page notifies users that “this phrase may be associated with behavior or content that violates our guidelines. Promoting a safe and positive experience is TikTok’s top priority.” However, some videos depicting the trend are still visible on the app if users search for incorrect spellings of keywords associated with the challenge, such as “milk craate” or “milk cratee.” It’s worth noting that although these videos don’t have a significant amount of views, they’ve still managed to slip through the cracks of the ban and remain on the app.

TikTok’s rise to popularity has seen numerous dangerous challenges go viral on the platform over the past few years. In 2019, a popular “throw it in the air” trend involved TikTok users forming a circle where nobody is allowed to move and then putting a phone on the floor to record them throwing an item up in the air on top of themselves to see who the object hits on its way down. Last year, a popular “skull-breaker” trend that went viral on the app prompted criminal charges after a teen was hospitalized as a result of the challenge. The trend involved tricking a person to fall backward on their head.

Dangerous trends like these, including the most recent milk crate challenge, have forced TikTok to take action to prevent its users from putting themselves in harmful situations.

Forget what you’ve heard: There are many shortcuts to success.

Tapping into someone else’s experience is a tried-and-true method, which is why two-time Y Combinator participant Chris Morton wrote a guest post for Extra Crunch with advice for founders hoping to be accepted by the famed accelerator.

Morton, who has also reviewed thousands of YC applications, shares his thoughts on when to submit an application, what to do if you miss the deadline and whether you’ll need to relocate if accepted.

“Remember that your application should be good enough to get an interview, not win a prize,” says Morton. “Go back to work instead of spending more time perfecting an application.”

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In an interview with reporter Anna Heim, Romania-based marketer Robert Katai discussed some of the methods he uses to help clients refine their content and branding strategies.

“Today, content creation is free — everybody can do it. The hard part is how you distribute and amplify that.”

Katai also shared his impressions of Romania’s startup ecosystem, suggestions for maintaining top-of-mind status with customers, and reinforced the often-overlooked need to continually repurpose content to grab mindshare.

Like our other growth marketing interviews, there’s no paywall.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week! I hope you have a fantastic weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Why global investors are flocking to back Latin American startups

Latin America’s increasingly dynamic venture capital scene has been making headlines of late. To learn more about why investors are so enthusiastic, senior reporter Mary Ann Azevedo spoke to several who are actively engaged with the region:

• Shu Nyatta, managing partner, SoftBank
• Ethan Choi, partner, Accel
• Julie Ruvolo, director of venture capital, LAVCA
• Bill Cilluffo, partner, QED Investors
• Ana Cristina Gadala-Maria, principal, QED Investors
• Ross Darwin, principal, Owl Ventures

“I am not surprised by all the activity,” Mary Ann writes. “However, I am a bit taken aback by the sheer number of rounds, the caliber of firms leading them and the sky-high valuations.

“It seems that the region is finally, and deservedly, being taken seriously. This is likely just the beginning.”

Corporate venture capital follows the same trend as other VC markets: Up

Corporations are not remaining on the sidelines of the fiery 2021 venture capital game, Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim note in The Exchange.

After parsing data from CB Insights and Stryber and chatting with a handful of investors, Alex and Anna concluded that the corporate venture capital market looks a lot like other VC markets.

“Perhaps this should not be a surprise,” they write. “We’ve seen non-venture funds flow into the later stages of startup land, pushing VCs toward earlier-stage and more venture-y deals. Why would CVCs be immune to the same trend?”

Ramp and Brex draw diverging market plans with M&A strategies

Corporate spending management startup Brex raised a $300 million Series C and acquired Buyer just a week after rival Brex announced it had acquired Israeli fintech Weav.

Ryan Lawler and Alex Wilhelm dug into the Ramp-Brex rivalry, and what those acquisitions say about their diverging strategies.

“From a high level, all of the recent deal-making in corporate cards and spend management shows that it’s not enough to just help companies track what employees are expensing these days,” they write.

“As the market matures and feature sets begin to converge, the players are seeking to differentiate themselves from the competition.”

Boston’s startup market is more than setting records in scorching start to year

Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim interviewed VCs and corralled data to present a detailed picture of Boston’s startup funding scene.

“Boston is benefiting from larger structural changes to at least the U.S. venture capital market, helping close historical gaps in its startup funding market and access funds that previously might have skipped the region,” they write.

“And local university density isn’t hurting the city’s cause, either, boosting its ability to form new companies during a period of rich investment access.”

Europe’s quick-commerce startups are overhyped: Lessons from China

Half of the companies offering instant grocery delivery in Europe were founded last year as the pandemic reshaped most aspects of our existence.

To date, they’ve raised about $2 billion, but Picus Capital’s Alexander Kremer says startup lessons from China suggest that “instant delivery is not the magic bullet to crack the dominance” of old-school grocery players.

“If the performance of online grocery platforms in China (a market five to seven years ahead of Europe in terms of online retail) is anything to go by, a range of B2C business models would be more likely to displace the traditional grocery retailers.”

D2C specs purveyor Warby Parker files to go public

For The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm examines the S-1 filing from Warby Parker, “a consumer hardware company with two main sales channels, largely attractive economics, falling losses and rising adjusted profitability. You could even argue that it handled the pandemic well, despite COVID-19’s negative impact on its operations.”

But how are its growth prospects?

Dear Sophie: Can I still get a green card through marriage if I’m divorcing?

Dear Sophie,

I received a conditional green card after my wife and I got married in 2019. Recently, we have made the difficult decision to end our marriage. I want to continue living and working in the United States.

Is it still possible for me to complete my green card based on my marriage through the I-751 process or do I need to do something else, like ask my employer to sponsor me for a work visa?

— Better to Have Loved and Lost

Using AI to reboot brand-client relationships

Marketing automation can help boost key metrics, but it can also be a disservice to brands by perpetually devaluing goods and services, ShareThis’ Michael Gorman writes in a guest column.

Companies with a narrow focus on driving conversions are missing the bigger picture: AI can help create richer experiences that identify consumer actions and intent while also improving customer experiences.

“We live in a world rich with data, and insights are growing more vibrant every day,” he writes.

Israel’s maturing fintech ecosystem may soon create global disruptors

Fintech startups based in Israel raised more than $1.8 billion in 2019, but in Q1 2021, companies in the category raised $1.1 billion.

Facilitating a wide range of services, more than a dozen fintech unicorns have already emerged in a country that has a population slightly smaller than Los Angeles County, many of them started by entrepreneurs who lacked financial backgrounds.

“So what is it about Israeli-founded fintech startups that stand out from their scaling neighbors across the pond?” asks Flint Capital’s Tel Aviv-based investor, Adi Levanon.

Forbes jumps into hot media liquidity summer with a SPAC combo

For The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm takes stock of Forbes’ SPAC combination during a week when POLITICO was snatched up for more than $1 billion by Axel Springer and just a few months after BuzzFeed went public via a blank-check company.

“Is it the most exciting debut? No,” he writes.

“But it does highlight that with enough sheer gumption, one can take a magazine business into the digital age and keep aggregate revenue growing. That’s worth something.”

Are B2B SaaS marketers getting it wrong?

Technical jargon is one of the most annoying aspects of technology marketing.

Sadly, it tends to perpetuate itself: Marketers are terrified of making a wrong move, so they tend to copy what everyone else is doing.

If you want to attract customers and drive higher conversions, cut the jargon.

“Do everything you can to be immediately understood and you’ll have a much better chance of cutting through the noise and pushing clear and persuasive benefits in a way no prospect can resist,” advises Konrad Sanders, CEO of The Creative Copywriter.

Linux is set for a big release this Sunday August 29, setting the stage for enterprise and cloud applications for months to come. The 5.14 kernel update will include security and performance improvements.

A particular area of interest for both enterprise and cloud users is always security and to that end, Linux 5.14 will help with several new capabilities. Mike McGrath, vice president, Linux Engineering at Red Hat told TechCrunch that the kernel update includes a feature known as core scheduling, which is intended to help mitigate processor-level vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown, which first surfaced in 2018. One of the ways that Linux users have had to mitigate those vulnerabilities is by disabling hyper-threading on CPUs and therefore taking a performance hit.

“More specifically, the feature helps to split trusted and untrusted tasks so that they don’t share a core, limiting the overall threat surface while keeping cloud-scale performance relatively unchanged,” McGrath explained.

Another area of security innovation in Linux 5.14 is a feature that has been in development for over a year and a half that will help to protect system memory in a better way than before. Attacks against Linux and other operating systems often target memory as a primary attack surface to exploit. With the new kernel, there is a capability known as memfd_secret () that will enable an application running on a Linux system to create a memory range that is inaccessible to anyone else, including the kernel.

“This means cryptographic keys, sensitive data and other secrets can be stored there to limit exposure to other users or system activities,” McGrath said.

At the heart of the open source Linux operating system that powers much of the cloud and enterprise application delivery is what is known as the Linux kernel. The kernel is the component that provides the core functionality for system operations.

The Linux 5.14 kernel release has gone through seven release candidates over the last two months and benefits from the contributions of 1,650 different developers. Those that contribute to Linux kernel development include individual contributors, as well as large vendors like Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle and Samsung. One of the largest contributors to any given Linux kernel release is IBM’s Red Hat business unit. IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion in a deal that closed in 2019.

“As with pretty much every kernel release, we see some very innovative capabilities in 5.14,” McGrath said.

While Linux 5.14 will be out soon, it often takes time until it is adopted inside of enterprise releases. McGrath said that Linux 5.14 will first appear in Red Hat’s Fedora community Linux distribution and will be a part of the future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 release. Gerald Pfeifer, CTO for enterprise Linux vendor SUSE, told TechCrunch that his company’s openSUSE Tumbleweed community release will likely include the Linux 5.14 kernel within “days” of the official release. On the enterprise side, he noted that SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4, due next spring, is scheduled to come with the 5.14 kernel.

The new Linux update follows a major milestone for the open source operating system, as it was 30 years ago this past Wednesday that creator Linus Torvalds (pictured above) first publicly announced the effort. Over that time Linux has gone from being a hobbyist effort to powering the infrastructure of the internet.

McGrath commented that Linux is already the backbone for the modern cloud and Red Hat is also excited about how Linux will be the backbone for edge computing — not just within telecommunications, but broadly across all industries, from manufacturing and healthcare to entertainment and service providers, in the years to come.

The longevity and continued importance of Linux for the next 30 years is assured in Pfeifer’s view. He noted that over the decades Linux and open source have opened up unprecedented potential for innovation, coupled with openness and independence.

“Will Linux, the kernel, still be the leader in 30 years? I don’t know. Will it be relevant? Absolutely,” he said. “Many of the approaches we have created and developed will still be pillars of technological progress 30 years from now. Of that I am certain.”