Category: Tech news

WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist on emotional connection, continental affairs, and the ulterior motives of chatbots.

On Wednesday morning, the company unveiled new folding phones, some Wear OS smartwatches, and even more wireless earbuds.

The company’s claims cloak threats to millions of users’ iCloud, iMessage, and facial verification data.

Need a new computer or just a soothing weighted blanket for the new school year? We found deals on some of our favorites.

The landmark assessment was dire. But it shows that by slashing methane emissions, humanity can make rapid progress in fighting climate change.

If you’re preparing for yet another round of homeschooling, we’ve identified a few ways to make this school year suck just a little bit less.

A sweeping AI has become central to how the US handles the opioid crisis. It may only be making the crisis worse.

You may not have the full story about what network you’re on—and how well you’re protected.

The next version of Apple’s iPhone operating system debuts this fall, but you can try the public beta—at your own risk.

With the fourth quarter now upon us, every industry faces a challenge in managing a holiday production calendar that will deliver the goods. The key for startups looking to defend the quarter from disruptions is to adopt a proactive, data-driven approach to inventory management.

Here are five methods we’ve been counseling clients to adopt:

• Use data and analytics to identify and map out the inventory being affected by the global shipping crisis. If you don’t have the data about what is on a ship transporting your materials, then use this crisis as an opportunity to justify prioritizing supply chain digital transformation with data, IoT and advanced analytics (e.g., machine learning and simulation). You need to know the location of your goods all times if you are going to successfully gauge what impact a shortage will have on your operation.

  Ultimately, AI will help startups understand how myriad disruptions affect their supply chain so they can better respond with a Plan B when the unthinkable happens.

• If you don’t have the data readily available, then you need to partner with a vendor and use a secure environment to share second-party data to deliver AI-driven actionable insights on the business impact on all parties involved, from startup to retailer to the consumer.
• Simulate and forecast the impact of these supply-side issues on the demand side. Conduct scenario planning exercises and inform critical business decisions. If this ability is not in place, an emergency like a pandemic, civil unrest or an uncontrollable rate hike will wreak havoc on your business plan. Use this situation as an opportunity to put a disaster management program in place to prepare for the potential risks.
  

  

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 9, 2021. We are ever so glad that you are here. We have global startup news for you, rocket news, car-rental IPO news and more. And if you are a student, we even have Extra Crunch discounts for you. Call it a technology and money smorgasbord. All in one email. Let’s go! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Turo is taking its car rental business public: Turo, a well-known U.S. startup that allows folks to rent their car to other folks, has privately filed to go public. Oh boy are we curious what its numbers show. Not only because it’s an S-1 that we’ve wanted to read for some time, but also because we’re incredibly curious about how the company navigated the pandemic and the changing world of transit during the last 18 months or so. More when it files publicly, you know, to go public.
• China’s tech crackdown continues: Another weekend, another set of regulatory actions from China’s government. Tencent and the larger gaming world could be in trouble next. The turbulence was enough for NetEase, a major gaming company in China, to delay the Hong Kong listing of its music business. Recall that Tencent Music is publicly listed.
• SpaceX buys Swarm Technologies: After seeing a friend get hooked up to Starlink the other day, what SpaceX does in the connectivity space is now more real to your humble scribe than theoretical. So the news that the space launch company is buying Swarm Technologies caught my eye. What does Swarm do? Per TechCrunch, it “operates a constellation of 120 sandwich-sized satellites as well as a ground station network.” Precisely how that may or may not link up to current SpaceX efforts is unclear.

Startups/VC

Let’s start with a brace of unicorn stories and then delve into some earlier-stage startup news, yeah?

• Indian edtech is still hot: Another day, another edtech unicorn. This time it’s UpGrad, a Bangalore-based startup that “specializes in higher education and upskilling courses.” It just raised $185 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. Temasek led the round. Notably, it was a two-part affair, with an earlier tranche worth $120 million first valuing UpGrad at a price of around $600 million.
• Turkey’s first $10B startup: $1 billion isn’t cool. You know what is? $10 billion. I suppose that that means that Turkish e-commerce platform Trendyol is cool? At least General Atlantic and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 think that it is cool enough to be worth $16.5 billion. Per our reporting, the company serves around 30 million shoppers who generate around 1 million packages per day. That’s a lot of shipping.

Now, let’s talk about some younger startups:

• RentCheck wants you to get your dang deposit back: And it has raised $2.6 million to power its efforts. Everyone knows what the problem space is here, so we care a bit more about how the company intends to tilt the rental market more toward renters themselves. Per TechCrunch, the company’s software “works by providing a way for property managers to facilitate and conduct remote, guided property inspections.” So long as more of us get our dang money back, cool.
• Canopy raises $15M for loan-servicing software: Sure, the back end of the financial world isn’t super fun to think about, but it is huge and potentially lucrative. Canopy Servicing is attacking the fintech market with a focus on building software that will help companies better offer and service loans. Credit is a massive problem space, and with $15 million new dollars, it will be interesting to see how quickly this API-delivered startup can grow.
• Meta app search, hell yeah: Today CommandBar left its beta period and announced that it has raised $4.8 million. The company’s tech is a search layer that sits atop web apps, making them easier to, well, search. Frankly, this kicks butt. Why? Because finding what you need inside of web apps can be an enormous hassle if you are in a hurry and not fluent in the application you are presented with. Which happens to everyone. Every day.
• LawVu is building Salesforce for legal teams: Back to the topic of things that are important, if not entirely Super Very Cool, let’s talk about software aimed at helping legal teams. LawVu is working in the space, and just raised $17 million NZD to back its efforts. It’s building a digital space for legal teams to share documents, communicate and more.
• Moove wants to provide car financing to African drivers: After noting that African car ownership rates lagged other continents, the founders of Moove decided to tackle the issue. The startup is starting with working to provide asset-backed financing to folks who make money with their cars and just raised $23 million.

Early-stage brands should also unlock the power of influencers

Before you hire a marketing consultant who doesn’t understand your products or commit to a CMO who has several years of experience — but none in your sector — consider influencer marketing.

If the phrase evokes images of celebrities hawking hard seltzer, think again: An influencer can be as humble as an enthusiastic Reddit user who manages your Telegram channel.

According to Uber growth marketing manager Jonathan Martinez:

“ … You don’t need to find influencers with millions of followers. Instead, lean toward microinfluencers for testing, which will bring cost efficiency and the ability to sponsor a diverse range of people.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• There will now be ads in your Instagram e-commerce experience: Call it a feature or not, Instagram is bolstering its ads business by building advertising slots that include “both single images and [an] option for an image carousel.” You are welcome, Instagram users.
• How one tech company is building an antiracist culture: TechCrunch’s Ron Miller spoke to several Twilio execs about how their company is working to be a bit more than diversity-friendly. They want Twilio to be opposed to racism. Good. Let’s hope more companies follow suit.
• Facebook under fire for cutting off research access: After Big Blue decided “to close accounts connected to a misinformation research project last week,” Congress got mad. Now a cadre of senators are pressing the company on its decision to cut off access to the researchers, which puts Facebook in the position of managing to have engendered a negative press cycle and more congressional oversight in a single move. You have to give the company points for efficiency.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: Getty Images

Are you all caught up on last week’s coverage of growth marketing? If not, read it here.

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

Community

Image Credits: Apress

Join TechCrunch Managing Editor Danny Crichton for a Twitter Spaces event tomorrow, August 10, at 3 p.m. PDT/6 p.m. EDT. Danny will be joined by Noah Giansiracusa, the author of “How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News: Exploring the Impacts of Social Media, Deepfakes, GPT-3, and More.” They’ll discuss Giansiracusa’s book and invite the audience to ask questions.

Ariana Grande strutted and soared around a candy-colored series of Fortnite sets in Epic’s latest major in-game live music event. The multi-day “tour” offered gamers and Grande fans alike plenty to enjoy while showcasing Epic’s impressively smooth and visually inventive vision for live events that millions of people can enjoy simultaneously.

Fortnite players have known an Ariana Grande event was in the works for a while, and the concert followed previous in-game events featuring rapper Travis Scott and Marshmello. Scott’s in-game performance saw 12.3 million live viewers, a number that the Ariana Grande event is likely to top, given that it ran over multiple days.

Epic put up a video of the concert that’s well worth checking out, if only to marvel at the kind of stuff that’s possible in gaming worlds these days. Experiencing the event live in the game is obviously ideal, but the video captures the experience pretty well, minus the sense of presence from having an avatar zooming around the space with grande Grande.

This time around, the show featured a handful of mini-games that gave players more to do than just flying around while a gigantic virtual pop star does her thing. The sequence kicked off with players surfing a rainbow racetrack, hitting power ups in a cross between Mario Kart and Splatoon to “Come & Go” by Juice WRLD and Marshmello. The racetrack sequence was followed by bouncing players through a Dr. Seuss-style landscape with candy-pink trees and giant floating eyeballs before dropping them into a mini-game shooting down the game’s Storm King boss to Wolfmother’s “Victorious.”

Grande made her Fortnite debut a few songs in with the 2019 hit “7 Rings,” streaking across the sky and materializing on top of a planet suspended in a sea of stars. Later she soared through the clouds with angelic wings as players followed, suspended in rainbow bubbles. In the coolest portion, a skyscraper-high Grande ascended a series of Escher-esque staircases with a giant diamond mallet before slinging it to shatter the sky, shotput-style.

Fortnite’s latest event didn’t have any huge surprises, but that’s only because Epic sets the bar so high. Getting dressed up in your favorite skin to sail around a skyscraper-tall pop star along with millions of people around the world might not be everyone’s vision for the metaverse, but Fortnite’s wildly imaginative live events are a taste of the future that here’s right now.

Match today is introducing new features that aim to address some of users’ complaints with modern-day dating apps — like how much time it takes to find a relevant match and how frustrating it is when users ghost one another after the initial conversation fades. As part of a new strategy to better position Match for more “emotionally mature” singles (read: adults), the company says it will begin beta testing a recommendation system called “Matched by Us,” which may pave the way for a broader matchmaking service in the future. It’s also testing an anti-ghosting feature that pushes users to either continue a conversation or unmatch the recipient instead of leaving them hanging.

The features are designed to address the challenges that face Match’s older demographic. Match users tend to be in their 30s and up, and have full lives. They’re generally ready to find relationships and settle down with a partner. That’s a different life phase than those using other Match dating apps, like Tinder, where younger users are still in a more exploratory phase and enjoy going on many dates, including casual dates.

“When we talk to our members, we hear a lot of frustration around [there being] a lot of swiping, a lot of messaging back and forth — that’s happening in the dating world more broadly,” explains Dushyant Saraph, Match’s chief product officer. “When we think about folks on our product, who don’t have a ton of time, that’s where ‘Matched by Us’ came from. Our singles don’t want to swipe through hundreds of profiles,” he says.

Image Credits: Match

The new feature, which is made available to free and paid users alike, will present one, free customized match every week, where both users can see each other and no longer have to wait for a “like” back in order to engage in a conversation.

The system works to find compatible matches by algorithmically examining a new set of preferences around users’ personalities, based on responses to questions posed in users’ Match bios.

For example, questions may ask about users’ five-year plans, their favorite weekend activities, or whether they’re open to moving somewhere new if they find the right person. The latter has become especially relevant in the new age of remote work, driven by the pandemic, which no longer requires people to live in the bigger cities where their company may be headquartered, Saraph notes.

Image Credits: Match

Currently, the system will recommend a match based on a holistic view of users’ preferences, as determined by an algorithm, but the company has been internally testing adding a layer of human curation to its suggestions, as well.

In other words, Match is testing an actual match-making service.

For the time being, however, the human curation team inside Match is working in more of an R&D capacity, Saraph says.

“We’ve been flexing how many experts we need as we’re testing kind of different concepts — everything from coaching to expert picks, where we’re doing human curation,” he says. The team also works on other features, like suggesting conversation starters to keep conversations going.

“Long-term we expect to be flexible, depending on which of these [products] is most interesting to our members, and scaling up our expert team accordingly. Right now, human curation is one area that we’re really excited about and want to crack, and I think you’ll hear more about that in the coming months,” Saraph adds.

Another new feature aimed at helping adults to stop waste their time on dating apps involves how Match will handle matches’ conversations. Typically, conversations either take off leading to real-world dates, or slowly fade away, until communication stops altogether. Sometimes, the other party simply “ghosts,” and never responds at all.

Image Credits: Match

Users told Match that their main issue with ghosting is the uncertainty around what it means.

Did the person they matched with just get busy, or did they decide they weren’t interested?, users wonder.

A new feature aims to keep conversations’ momentum going by nudging users when a conversation is about to “expire” — that is, when it will be archived into a new section of the inbox for inactive conversations.

And if you are in the app, you can visit the conversation to get suggestions of conversation starters to help you pick things back up, or you can tap a button to unmatch the other user. The latter would send a more explicit signal to the recipient that there was a lack of interest, though it won’t actually push a notification that tells the user they’ve been unmatched. (That can sometimes lead to safety issues, particularly for women who have received threats from men they’ve rejected.)

Image Credits: Match

Match says it’s currently testing the right number of days to elapse before it nudges users to either re-engage or end their conversations with an unmatch. But the right amount of time seems to be in the three to five-day range, Saraph says.

The new features are rolling out to some portion of Match’s U.S. user base in beta, as the company kicks off a new brand campaign targeting adult daters. The campaign’s message is that Match understands what modern adult singles are looking for in order to date better, and these features are an example of that understanding being put into practice.

The beta tests are rolling out across all Match platforms, including iOS, Android, mobile web and desktop over the next few months, starting in the U.S.

The news follows a mixed earnings report from the dating app giant, Match Group, which owns top brands including Match, Tinder, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Hinge and others. The company saw the impact of a pandemic recovery in the second quarter, with 15 million paying customers across its brands, up from 13 million in the year-ago quarter. Revenue was $707.8 million, topping analyst projections of $694 million. But Match Group missed on earnings, with net income of $140.9 million, or 46 cents a share, when analysts expected 49 cents per share.

The company also spoke in detail about its plans for social networking app maker Hyperconnect, a company Match bought for $1.73 billion earlier this year. Match Group said it plans to add audio and video chat, including live video, to its dating brand portfolio.

Match’s dating app is among those that will benefit from Hyperconnect integrations, Saraph told TechCrunch, as Match plans to explore “building out live experiences.” The company expects these to be added around year end toward the beginning of 2022, we’re told.

They’ve made waves on every screen and have been sponsored by nearly every major brand, from Charli D’Amelio x Hollister to MrBeast x Honey. And they’re only multiplying.

If influencers aren’t part of your early-stage growth marketing plan, it’s time to get on board. When companies think of how to rapidly increase their reach and revenue, paid acquisition is always at the top of the list. But there are other important pillars in a growth marketing engine, such as leveraging lifecycle marketing, cultivating organic reach via SEO and doing later-stage brand marketing.

However, an often overlooked tactic for new brands is influencer marketing. If the value and power of influencer marketing were widespread knowledge, we would see more of an uptick. And it doesn’t help that we have a supply-constrained pool of marketers who understand how to unlock this lever.

Influencer marketing spending from 2016 to 2021 (predicted). Image Credits: Jonathan Martinez

This marketing tactic is only growing. So let’s demystify influencer marketing, learn how to couple it with a little-known paid marketing hack and uncover the numerous mediums to leverage influencer assets. After three years at Postmates (which nailed influencer marketing), being a YouTuber myself in 2008 and advising startups, I’ve unlocked the power of influencer marketing and want everyone to do the same.

Starting out

If there’s one key piece of advice to take from this column, it’s that influencer marketing isn’t solely for big brands. It’s for every brand. As you start to formulate your growth strategy, make sure to include an influencer pillar as part of the plan.

When reaching out to influencers, it’s a sheer numbers game in capturing their attention and pitching your brand, but there are myriad ways to increase response conversion. Below are the cold message components you must nail down before reaching out to influencers:

• Your brand pitch.
• An enticing offer.
• Clear next steps.

The one constant with influencers is the high number of messages they receive from fans and brands alike. If you’re at the marketing stage, nailing your pitch should hopefully be natural at this point, so utilize what you’ve crafted and condense it down to a sentence or two.

What are your brand’s key value propositions, and why should influencers care? To show them, relate your brand to their category, to their style and to the content that they post.

After the pitch, an irresistible offer needs to follow — something that’s the opposite of this: “I’ll send you a few samples of our protein bars.” The conversion rate will be a freakishly low tenth of a percent with that offer. Instead, make your offer enticing and utilize one of these structures: fixed fee, fixed fee + performance or performance.

Depending on budget and risk tolerance, there are a few ways to structure an influencer offer: paying a one-time fixed fee, paying for each conversion (CPA performance basis) or a hybrid of the two.

A major UN scientific report has concluded that human activity is changing the climate at an unprecedented rate. The report has been describe as a “code red for humanity” by its authors.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is stern and blunt in its conclusions: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, oceans, and land,” it says.

The IPCC — a grouping of scientists whose findings are endorsed by the world’s governments — warns of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts, and flooding and a key temperature limit being broken inside the next decade.

This “means that the world will hit one-and-a-half degrees warming much earlier than expected, possibly the middle of 2034” says the report.

The IPCC says going past 1.5 C will create more intense and more frequent heat waves.

Prof. Ed Hawkins, from the University of Reading, U.K., one of the report’s authors said: “It is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet.”

However, the scientists say a catastrophe can be avoided if the world acts fast, and, with deep cuts to the emissions of greenhouse gases, could stabilize rising temperatures.

And scientists are hopeful that global emissions can be cut by 2030 and reach net zero by the middle of this century.

The report is the first major review by the IPCC since 2013 and comes less than three months before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

IPCC report key points

• 1.5 C will be reached by 2040 in all scenarios unless emissions aren’t slashed in the next few years.
• Keeping to 1.5 C will require “immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions” in emissions and slower action leads to 2 C and more suffering for all life on Earth.
• Human influence is “very likely” (90%) the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s and the decrease in Arctic sea ice.
• Heat waves have become more frequent and more intense since the 1950s, while cold events have become less frequent and less severe.
• There will be likely increases in “fire weather” in many countries.
• Drought is increasing in more than 90% of regions.
• Global surface temperature was 1.09 C higher in the decade between 2011-2020 than between 1850-1900.
• The past five years have been the hottest on record since 1850.
• The recent rate of sea-level rise has nearly tripled compared with 1901-1971.
• A rise of around 2 meters in sea levels by 2100 cannot be ruled out — and neither can a 5-meter rise by 2150, threatening millions of people in coastal areas.
• Extreme sea-level events that occurred once a century are projected to occur at least annually.

Under all the emissions scenarios considered in the report, all targets for reductions targets will be broken this century unless huge cuts in carbon emissions take place.

Solutions proposed by the scientists include using clean technology, carbon capture and storage, or planting trees.

Another co-author, Prof. Piers Forster from the University of Leeds, U.K., was quoted as saying: “If we are able to achieve net-zero, we hopefully won’t get any further temperature increase; and if we are able to achieve net-zero greenhouse gases, we should eventually be able to reverse some of that temperature increase and get some cooling.”

The IPCC report found that 2,400 billion tonnes of CO2 have been emitted by humanity since 1850, and that we can only leak another 400 billion tonnes to have a 66% chance of keeping to 1.5 C.

This means the planet has spent 86% of its carbon “budget” already.

Furthermore, no one is safe from the effects of climate change.

“We can no longer assume that citizens of more affluent and secure countries like Canada, Germany, Japan, and the U.S. will be able to ride out the worst excesses of a rapidly destabilizing climate,” says Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy. “It’s clear we’re all in the same boat — facing a challenge that will affect every one of us within our lifetimes.”