Category: Tech news

Last year, Google launched the beta of Currents, which was essentially a rebrand of Google+ for G Suite users, since Google+ for consumers went to meet its maker in April 2019. While Google+ was meant to be an all-purpose social network, the idea behind Currents is more akin to what Microsoft is doing with Yammer or Facebook with Workplace. It’s meant to give employees a forum for internal discussions and announcements.

To complicate matters, Google kept Google+ around, even after the launch of Currents, but in an email to G Suite admins, it has now announced that Google+ for G Suite will close its doors on July 6, after which there will be no way to opt out of Currents or revert back to Google+.

And with that, Google has driven the final nail into Google+’s coffin. The Google+ mobile apps will be automatically updated to Currents. All existing links to Google+ will redirect to Currents.

Going forward, Google+ will only live on as a hazy memory, filled with circles of friends, all of which were forced to use their real name (at least at the beginning), +1 buttons everywhere, sparks and the promise of fun games, ripples and more.

Currents is all business — and while I’m not aware of a lot of companies that use it, it looks to be a solid option for companies that would otherwise use the Yammer/Teams combination in the Microsoft ecosystem. Now, I guess, we can start the countdown before Google launches another social network.

If you want to take a stroll down memory lane, check out our history of Google+ below:

Whether you’re trying to maintain your social distance or just looking for other ways to speak up, here are some other ideas on how to contribute.

Alexis Ohanian, the founder and former CEO of Reddit, stepped down from his position on the company’s board Friday as the U.S. roils with nationwide protests against police brutality after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, an unarmed black man.

Ohanian is calling on the company he founded to fill his position with a black board member, a high-profile step for a company with its own rocky track record around issues of race.

“I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in power right now,” Ohanian said in his announcement. “To everyone fighting to fix our broken nation: do not stop.”

With the decision, Ohanian also announced that future gains of his company stock would be invested in the black community, “chiefly to curb racial hate.” That amount could total to around $50 million, according to reliable sources. His first move will be to give $1 million to Know Your Rights Camp, an organization founded by Colin Kaepernick that focuses on self-empowerment and safety for black and brown communities.

Many leaders within tech are calling for the industry to have its own reckoning with entrenched racism, an effort Ohanian’s move may amplify. Tech companies have long been criticized for their broad lack of black leadership at the highest levels, a failing that likely factors into their myriad policy failures around race — like the fact that Facebook only banned white nationalism one year ago.

“I co-founded @reddit 15 years ago to help people find community and a sense of belonging. It is long overdue to do the right thing. I’m doing this for me, for my family, and for my country” Ohanian wrote on Twitter. “I’m saying this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks: ‘What did you do?’ ”

Update: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (u/spez) said that the company would honor the request to bring on a black board member in Ohanian’s place.

Ohanian stepped away from his daily duties at Reddit in 2018 but kept a seat on the board at the time. His transition to being more hands-off at the company he founded has been gradual over the last few years as he spent more time on Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture fund he co-founded. In recent years, Ohanian has also become a more outspoken advocate for policies like paid family leave, calling for more equitable, flexible leave policies and citing his own experience as a father. In 2017, Ohanian had a daughter with his wife, tennis legend Serena Williams.

Reddit occupies a unique place among social media platforms. It has largely avoided the spotlight of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but not for lack of its own systemic problems. Though it hasn’t been as high-profile, the platform has faced its own reckoning around harmful content in recent years for hosting virulently racist content on subcommunities like r/blackpeoplehate, r/The_Donald and others. Reddit has taken action against those communities over time, either banning them outright or placing them in a state of “quarantine” where they are not surfaced in search or recommendations and require a user to click through to view them.

The company’s history with diversifying its leadership has been spotty. In 2015, internal turmoil at the company and a backlash from its users led to the resignation of the company’s interim CEO, Ellen Pao. As we reported in 2016, more than a dozen senior Reddit employees, many of them women and people of color, left the company in the resulting tumult. As it continued its overdue campaign to crack down on violence and hate speech, Reddit brought in its first female board member, Porter Gale, last year.

In a post on Reddit, Huffman also addressed the company’s troubled history of allowing often violent and extreme racist content to flourish on the platform.

“In 2018, I confusingly said racism is not against the rules, but also isn’t welcome on Reddit. This gap between our content policy and our values has eroded our effectiveness in combating hate and racism on Reddit; I accept full responsibility for this,” Huffman said.

He also acknowledged concerns from employees about the company’s policy decisions, expressed this week in response to an email he sent out about ongoing protests and the killing of George Floyd.

“These questions, which I know are coming from a place of real pain and which I take to heart, are really a statement: There is an unacceptable gap between our beliefs as people and a company, and what you see in our content policy,” Huffman said.

The Square Off robotic chess board was already a great device for these times. The system makes it possible to play a solo game using 20 different degrees of difficulty or challenge someone remotely through chess.com. I met with the Mumbai-based startup a couple of CESes ago, and was quite impressed with the execution.

Now, in the face of massive global isolation courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has introduced a video calling feature. Using the connected app, players can connect with one another across the globe. It’s not quite like having another human on the other side of the board, but in these trying times and all that, we’ll take what we can get.

“The lockdowns have motivated people to rediscover their passion and the chess community is expanding,” CEO Bhavya Gohil says in a release. “The recent addition to the video calling feature was the call of the hour and we are thrilled for the response it has received. It takes the experience of connected board gaming one notch ahead. We are constantly innovating to provide the most quintessential gaming experience.”

The company says it has seen a 30% uptick in time spent on the board since the pandemic began. For those who are interested, there are a number of different board configurations currently available through the Square Off site. 

As the United States sees its second week of large-scale protests against police brutality, it’s painfully clear that the country’s racial divide requires significant short- and long-term action. But most of these calls for change gloss over the role Silicon Valley can and should play in mending the racial divide.

Right now, activists are rightfully urging the public to take two crucial steps: vote out state and local government leaders and support Black-owned businesses. Both steps are necessary, but the importance of the latter has been largely overshadowed. Leaders can enact policy change, but much of the structural racial disparity in the U.S. is economic. Black workers are vastly overrepresented in low-paying agricultural, domestic and service jobs.

They’re also far more likely to be unemployed (in normal economic circumstances, and especially during the pandemic). A Stanford University study found that only 1% of Black-owned businesses receive loans in their first year. That’s seven times lower than the percentage for white businesses.

Put simply, enacting new laws and overturning old ones won’t suddenly reverse decades of biased investment decisions. That’s why all over social media, there are grassroots pushes to shop Black. Apps like WeBuyBlack and eatOkra collate businesses and restaurants into one centralized database, while organizations like Bank Black encourage investment in Black-owned funds or Black-owned businesses.

But what happens when the hashtags stop trending, the protests stop attracting crowds, and the Twitter feeds return to celebrity gossip and reality show reactions? Many organizers worry that, after the media cycle of the George Floyd protests expire, widespread interest in fixing systemic racism will go away too. Apps may be helpful in propping up Black businesses, but they rely on customers fundamentally changing their purchasing and consumption habits. Perhaps the perfect storm of COVID-19 and Mr. Floyd’s death will result in a wide-scale transformation of consumer behavior. But that’s not a given, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be enough.

To systematically fix underinvestment in Black businesses, we need big tech to step up. Now.

In particular, while there’s been a lot of recent talk about “algorithmic bias” (preventing algorithms on sites like Facebook or Google from implicitly discriminating on the basis of race), there hasn’t been enough talk about proactively demanding “algorithmic equality.” What if, for instance, tech companies didn’t just focus on erasing the entrenched bias in their systems, but actually reprogrammed algos to elevate Black businesses, Black investors and Black voices?

This shift could involve deliberately increasing the proportion of Black-created products or restaurants that make it onto the landing pages of sites like Amazon and Grubhub. Less dramatically, it could tweak SEO language to better accommodate racial and regional differences among users. The algorithmic structures behind updates like Panda could be repurposed to systematically encourage the consumption of Black-created content, allowing Black voices and Black businesses to get proportional purchase in the American consumer diet.

There’s also no compelling reason to believe that these changes would harm user experience. A recent Brookings study found that minority-owned businesses are rated just as highly on Yelp as white-owned businesses. However, these minority-owned businesses grow more slowly and gain less traction than their white-owned counterparts — resulting in an annual loss of $3.9 billion across all Black businesses. To help resolve this glaring (and needless) inequality, Yelp could modify its algorithms to amplify high-performing Black-owned businesses. This could significantly increase the annual income of quality Black entrepreneurs, while also increasing the likelihood in overall investment in Black small businesses.

At the very least, giving Black business a short-term algorithmic advantage in take-out and delivery services could help stem the massive economic breach caused by the coronavirus and could help save the 40% of minority-owned businesses that have shut down because of the pandemic.

Nothing can undo the losses of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery or the countless other Black Americans who unjustly died as a result of this country’s broken system. What we can do is demand accountability and action, both from our political leaders and from the Silicon Valley CEOs who structure e-commerce.

With thoughtful, data-based modifications, online platforms can give Black entrepreneurs, creators and voices the opportunity to compete — an equality that has been denied for far too long.

Silver Lake is doubling down its bet on India’s Reliance Jio Platforms. The U.S. private equity firm said Friday it is buying an additional stake worth $600 million in the top Indian telecom operator, which has now raised $12.2 billion in less than two months at the height of a global pandemic.

The Menlo Park-headquartered firm, which invested nearly $750 million in Reliance Jio Platforms last month, said the additional infusion increases its stake in the Indian firm to 2.08%, up from 1.15%.

Silver Lake’s new investment is now the seventh deal Reliance Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of India’s most valued firm (Reliance Industries), has secured in just as many weeks by selling nearly 20% stake. Earlier on Friday (local time), Abu Dhabi-based sovereign firm Mubadala said it would invest $1.2 billion in Jio, a firm run by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man. Facebook, KKR, General Atlantic and Vista are the other investors that have wrote checks to Jio Platforms.

The announcement further captures the appeal of Jio Platforms, which has amassed more than 388 million subscribers in less than four years, to foreign investors looking for a slice of the world’s second-largest internet market.

Media reports have claimed in recent weeks that Amazon is considering buying stakes worth at least $2 billion in Bharti Airtel, India’s third largest telecom operator, while Google has held talks for a similar deal in Vodafone Idea, the second largest telecom operator.

Egon Durban, co-chief executive and managing partner at Silver Lake, said the recent investment momentum in Reliance Jio Platforms “validates a compelling business model and underscores our admiration for Mukesh Ambani, his team and their courageous vision in creating and building one of the world’s most remarkable technology companies.”

“We are excited to increase our exposure and bring more of our co-investors into this opportunity, further supporting Jio Platforms in its mission to bring the power of high-quality and affordable digital services to a mass consumer and small businesses population,” he added.

Silver Lake manages nearly $40 billion in combined assets and committed capital and has invested in dozens of tech firms over the years, including in video game engine maker Unity, audio and video communication service Skype, consultancy firm Gartner, Alibaba’s Ant Financial, computer giant Dell, and Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing.

Ambani is raising capital at least in part to cut his oil-to-retail giant Reliance Industries’ net debt of about $21 billion to zero by early 2021, a promise he made to shareholders earlier, said Mahesh Uppal, director of communications consultancy firm Com First. The company was debt free in 2012, but took loans to bankroll the creation of Jio Platforms.

“I would like to emphasise that Silver Lake’s additional investment in Jio Platforms, within a span of five weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic, is a strong endorsement of the intrinsic resilience of the Indian economy, which will surely grow bigger with comprehensive digital enablement,” said Ambani in a statement.

One of the earliest disruptions created by the novel coronavirus manifested in the form of event cancellations. Some of the world’s biggest tech conferences, like F8 and Google NEXT, got postponed and others turned to digital options to still connect. Even Disrupt is going digital this year.

It is an unprecedented time for the events world, so we are bringing someone right in the center of it to our Extra Crunch Live stage: Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz. In fact, Extra Crunch members can ask their own questions directly to the CEO and are encouraged to do so live on the call.

Hartz is leading the publicly traded company as it grows more popular than ever with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. At the same time, the global slowdown of in-person event ticketing due to COVID-19 has had a material impact on Eventbrite’s business. What does that mean for employee morale? Collaboration with other companies? And overall culture at the business?

Eventbrite has swiftly transitioned to virtual events, with thousands of listings across categories like professional events, classes, health and wellness, science and tech, community and culture and more. Hartz also told Billboard that the company remains committed to serving independent music venues, which have been hit hard by the global health crisis, and hinted that Eventbrite may shift to a self-service ticket model.

The company reported that, since enhancing its online events service in 2019, and in the midst of social distancing, Eventbrite users are posting nearly 20k online events every day, with a 2,000+ percent year-over-year increase of online events taking place in April 2020 compared to April 2019. This announcement came after Eventbrite said it would cut $100 million in costs, which included layoffs.

We’ll talk with Hartz about how she is leading her company through a crisis and what the future holds for bringing people together. We’ll also discuss how widespread layoffs may impact the future of diversity in our workforces.

Hartz will also be asked to weigh in on advice for other founders hoping to emerge from COVID-19 from fundraising to strategy. As always, EC subscribers are invited to log onto the call to ask questions live.

Details are below for Extra Crunch subscribers; if you need a pass, get a cheap trial here.

Chat with you all in a week!

When, where, Zoom

Twitter sees record downloads, Signal adds a new face-blurring feature and Facebook rethinks its approach to government-backed media.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 5, 2020.

1. Twitter has a record-breaking week as users looked for news of protests and COVID-19

Civil unrest due to the nationwide George Floyd protests drove Twitter to a record number of new installs this week, according to data from two app store intelligence firms, Apptopia and Sensor Tower. While the firms’ exact findings differed in terms of the total number of new downloads or when records were broken, the firms agreed that Twitter’s app had its largest-ever week, globally.

For example, according to Sensor Tower, Twitter saw just over 1 million installs on Monday, making it the day with the most single-day installs since the firm began tracking app store data on January 1, 2014.

2. Signal now has built-in face blurring for photos

This is supposed to make it easy to protect someone’s identity without leaving any trace on other, less secure apps. After noting Signal’s support of the protests against police brutality, founder Moxie Marlinspike wrote in a blog post, “We’ve also been working to figure out additional ways we can support everyone in the street right now. One immediate thing seems clear: 2020 is a pretty good year to cover your face.”

3. Facebook adds labels identifying state-controlled media

Facebook will soon add labels to news outlets owned or otherwise controlled by a government — that doesn’t necessarily mean the information is false or unreliable, but at least it’s worth considering the source. Those outlets will also be banned from buying ads starting this summer.

4. OTTO Motors raises $29M to fill factories with autonomous delivery robots

The OTTO Motors division of Clearpath Robotics launched in 2015. It’s landed a number of contracts to bring its autonomous mobile robot platform into factories, with customers including GE, Toyota, Nestlé and Berry Global.

5. How to get the most from your corporate VC after you get the check

Scott Orn of Kruze Consulting looks at the factors that founders need to keep in mind if they want the best chance at a productive and successful relationship with their corporate VC. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Google says Iranian, Chinese hackers targeted Trump, Biden campaigns

Shane Huntley, director for Google’s Threat Analysis Group, tweeted that hackers backed by China and Iran recently targeted the Trump and Biden campaigns using malicious phishing emails. But, Huntley said, there are “no signs of compromise,” and both campaigns were alerted.

7. PhotoRoom automagically removes background from your photo

The concept is extremely simple: After selecting a photo, PhotoRoom removes the background from that photo and lets you select another background. When you’re done tweaking, you can save the photo and open it in another app.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

While Friday’s report showed improved employment numbers, things could still get so much worse.

A “perfect storm” of ravenous locusts, flooding, and the Covid-19 pandemic threatens to create huge food shortages.

Plus: Facebook in its early days, reasonable speech on the internet, and an overdue decision in Philadelphia.

Research shows that calm and negotiation, not excessive force, reduces damage. So why are officers still turning to tear gas?

This week, we discuss how tools developed in Silicon Valley are being used to erode the privacy and safety of citizens protesting police brutality.

A view of the Washington. DC, of tomorrow, excerpted from ‘BURN-IN: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution.’

SpaceX launched its second Falcon 9 rocket in the span of just four days on Wednesday at 9:25 PM EDT (6:25 PM PDT). This one was carrying 60 more satellites for its Starlink constellation, which will bring the total currently in operation on orbit to 480. The launch took off from Florida, where SpaceX launched astronauts for the first time ever on Saturday for the final demonstration mission of its Crew Dragon to fulfill the requirements of NASA’s Commercial Crew human-rating process.

Today’s launch didn’t include any human passengers, but it did fly that next big batch of Starlink broadband internet satellites, as mentioned. Those will join the other Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, forming part of a network that will eventually serve to provide high-bandwidth, reliable internet connectivity, particularly in underserved areas where terrestrial networks either aren’t present or don’t offer high-speed connections.

This launch included a test of a new system that SpaceX designed in order to hopefully improve an issue its satellites have had with nighttime visibility from Earth. The test Starlink satellite, one of the 60, has a visor system installed that it can deploy post-launch in order to block the sun from reflecting off of its communication antenna surfaces. If it works as designed, it should greatly reduce sunlight reflected off of the satellite back to Earth, and SpaceX will then look to make it a standard part of its Starlink satellite design going forward.

Part of this launch included landing the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket used for the launch, which has already flown previously four times and been recovered – that makes this a rocket that has now flown five missions, and today it touched down safely once again on SpaceX’s drone landing barge in the ocean so it can potentially be used again.

SpaceX will also be attempting to recover the two fairing halves that form the protective nose cone used during launch at the top of the rocket to protect the payload being carried by the Falcon 9. We’ll provide an update about how that attempt goes once SpaceX provides details.

Tomorrow, June 4, actually marks the 10-year anniversary of the first flight of a Falcon 9 rocket – between this reusability record, and the much more historic first human spaceflight mission earlier this week, that’s quite the decade.