Category: Tech news

Tesla broke national labor laws when it unfairly prevented workers from unionizing, an administrative law judge in California ruled Friday.

The ruling, which will likely be appealed, was first reported by Bloomberg. Tesla has not responded to a request for comment. TechCrunch will update the article if Tesla responds.

The automaker and CEO Elon Musk were ordered by Judge Amita Baman Tracy to take several actions to remedy the violations, including reinstating and giving backpay to a fired pro-union employee. The judge also ordered Musk to hold a public meeting and read aloud the findings to employees at the factory informing them the NLRB concluded the company had broken the law.

From the ruling:

I recommend that Respondent be ordered to convene its employees and have Elon Musk (or, if he is no longer the chief executive officer, a high-ranking management official), in the presence security guards, managers and supervisors, a Board agent and an agent 15 of the Union, if the Region and/or the Union so desire, read the notice aloud to employees, or, at Respondent’s option, permit a Board agent, in the presence Musk, to read the notice to the employees at the Fremont facility only.

The NLRB, while able to determine Tesla violated the law, has a limited reach, Bloomberg noted. The NLRB, for instance, can’t hold executive personally liable, nor can it assess punitive damages.

The ruling, which was published Friday, found that Musk and Tesla had violated the National Labor Relations Act by repressing attempts to organize a union at the company’s Fremont. Calif., factory. The judge determined that Tesla violated labor laws when it created rules that prevented off-duty employees from distributing union organizing leaflets in the Fremont parking lot, fired two workers unfairly and interrogated employees about their union activities. The judge also determined that Musk’s own tweets violated the law when he implied that workers who unionized would have to give up company-paid stock options.

At least a dozen people have died of an acute lung condition related to vaping, and while officials aren’t ready to pin it on any one chemical or brand, they are warning that many of the patients reported buying THC cartridges from “informal sources” — which is to say off the street or online.

“The vast majority of patients received their products on the streets from friends or dealers,” said Dr. Jennifer Layden, chief epidemiologist for the Illinois Department of Health, in a press call today.

Unfortunately this also resulted in a huge variety of brand names and types of cartridges and devices. “Among all 86 patients in our study, 234 unique e-cigarette or vaping products across 87 different brands were reported,” Layden said. THC products were reported by more than three-quarters of those surveyed, with only 16% of patients saying they used only nicotine cartridges.

The most common brand name, which two-thirds of the patients surveyed reported using, was “Dank Vapes.” While testing of products with this brand name has not yet been carried out, it’s probably safest to avoid them for now. Studies have shown that even popular brands like Juul don’t know exactly what chemicals are produced when these substances are vaporized. And an NBC News-commissioned study showed that many off-brand cartridges contained pesticides that could form hydrogen cyanide when heated.

“We do not know yet what exactly is making people sick,” emphasized Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC. “For example, whether solvents or adulterants are leading to lung injury or whether cases stem from a single supplier or multiple ones. Because of the variety of chemicals that are present in e-cigarettes or vaping liquids and may be added to e-cigarettes or vaping liquid as well as the diversity of products in circulation, laboratory analysis may be complex, but these are ongoing.”

The CDC, FDA and individual states and cities have taken a variety of actions, banning vaping outright, restricting sales and so on. But in many places these sales were already illegal, or were conducted online in such a way that it is difficult to detect. And of course a great deal of the consumption of these products takes place at home or otherwise in private.

The worry, of course, is that by banning the use of vaping products, there is a risk of pushing smokers using them to quit back to cigarettes, which are obviously known to be extremely harmful. It’s certainly not ideal, but if certain vaping materials are causing immediate and serious harm to people, they shouldn’t be used at all, let alone as a smoking cessation product. In the meantime, proven (though perhaps less convenient) methods of quitting like nicotine gum and patches are still available.

The various medical authorities looking into this outbreak, which now affects more than 800 people, are being very cautious in identifying the cause, but are updating press regularly with new figures and any relevant information as the investigation proceeds.

Catch up on the most important news from today in two minutes or less.

Of the various channels available to growth marketers, podcast is among the most misunderstood.

Brands like Dollar Shave Club, Squarespace, and ZipRecruiter have deployed podcast advertising for user acquisition for years, but it’s still a channel that flies under the radar. We have managed tens of millions of dollars in podcast ad spend for challenger brands and market leaders alike, and are eager to share some tricks of the trade.

If you want to test in a channel where early adopters are being rewarded with both attractive CAC and scale, here’s what you need to know:

1. Podcast advertising is used very successfully as a direct-response channel with CAC on par with other consideration-stage activities. It is not just for awareness.
2. Podcast reach is very good, reaching 51% of US audiences aged 12+ monthly.
3. Ads read by hosts outperform canned “programmatic” ads.
4. Tracking is harder than most digital channels and the cost to test the channel is higher than most digital channels.

Dive deeper on podcast ads and other growth marketing tips with Extra Crunch’s ongoing coverage of growth marketing, where Right Side Up was recently featured as a Verified Expert Growth Marketer. 

Who listens, who advertises, and why bother?

Podcast listeners are a sought after group – the audience trends towards educated, early adopters with a high household income. You can find this profile elsewhere, but what makes podcasts unique is that they are choosing to consume that particular content time and time again. The host becomes a trusted voice to deliver them not only interesting stories and banter, but information on companies as well.

Often podcast advertisers are newcomers or start-ups, and the podcast ad might be the first time the listener has heard about that company. Having the first touch with consumers be from a thorough, personal, and often funny host-read interaction is incredibly valuable and helps brands jump over the credibility hurdle. Compare that to an impersonal banner ad, and I’d choose a podcast ad every time. 

Even though the term ‘podcast’ was coined in 2004, advertising in the medium has exploded in the last ~5 years. The IAB has been tracking podcast ad revenue since 2015, when the entire medium generated #105.7 million in ad sales. It recently released its third study of podcast ad revenue, which estimated the US market at $479 million in 2018, with growth accelerating to a projected  $1 billion+ by 2021.

Andreesen Horowitz did a great investor profile on the space earlier this year, with a helpful rundown of the holistic ecosystem, from hosting mechanisms and platforms to the pace of podcast monetization.

Historically, the medium has been dominated by a mix of comedians doing their own thing, radio entities simulcasting sports shows, and otherwise popular shows that had a devoted niche following relative to other mediums. Most advertisers bought podcast ads as an extension of their other audio acquisition campaigns.

Podcasts go mainstream

Then Serial came along, in 2014, exploding into popularity and pop culture. They ran a MailChimp ad that had someone mispronouncing the name of the company as “MailKimp”, which was a funny inside joke for those in the know. Nina Cwik and David Raphael, co-founders of Public Media Marketing, explain the initial conversation around this now iconic spot.

“While discussing a launch sponsorship with sponsors there wasn’t a huge amount of interest in taking a risk on a new show even with the amazing This American Life provenance. MailChimp was committed to supporting Serial. The talented production team at Serial and This American Life created MailKimp and the sponsor was rewarded for believing in the show.”

Not only were they rewarded by being a launch sponsor of one of the most successful podcasts in history, but once Serial and the medium itself expanded, a loving impersonation of Serial host Sarah Koenig and the MailKimp joke eventually made its way into a Saturday Night Live skit. Serial also appealed to a female audience, helping to bring new listeners into the channel, and podcasters and advertisers followed.

Over the past 5 years, the space has diversified. We now see so many different shows with all flavors of true crime, news and politics takes that you don’t hear in the broader media picture, women talking to other women about literally everything, comedy and pop culture pods as diverse as Bodega Boys, Who? Weekly, and RuPaul: What’s the Tee with Michelle Visage, and a podcast to go with every reality and television show you can think of. There are too many shows to talk about; there are over 750,000 shows indexed by iTunes.

How to engage for growth advertising

So how do companies start testing in podcasts? And how do they do so successfully?

Start with a strong (but doable budget) and take your time

We advise companies to start with a test spend that you consider meaningful in the context of your other customer acquisition efforts. Initial tests in the channel that are properly diversified typically vary from $50,000 to $150,000 in media cost. If the idea of a testing budget in the high five figures makes you gasp, don’t rush it. If you under-invest, you run the risk of a false negative, i.e. you didn’t spend enough to validate performance, or a false positive; when you buy tiny shows, one or two sales may pay back. If you make media decisions at scale based on that data, you may find yourself in deep water. If the risk of testing a new channel and having a dip in your CAC is too great, we recommend you exhaust other channels, like Facebook, before jumping into the podcast space.

Podcast offers advertisers a low barrier to entry. Creative production is limited to producing copy points for hosts to use as they record their ad reads. However, it is quite manual relative to digital channels, and can take weeks to put into place. Most purchasing is done through a show’s sales representation or network, via calls and emails, and set in advance (sometimes way in advance depending on inventory levels). It entails RFPing multiple network partners, doing research and outreach to independent shows, gathering rates and evaluating content, and finally making decisions based on budget and inventory availability. We often describe this as the media puzzle – making sure that the ideal shows, with favorable pricing are available when you want them to be. This can take time and some back and forth with your network rep to set in stone, so give yourself room to plan ahead.

What’s the media landscape look like and how do you pick shows? 

Image via Getty Images / venimo

We buy with a lot of direct shows, sales representation firms, and ad networks. We’re starting to see the beginnings of programmatic and exchange-based inventory become available, but it’s largely impression-based media, which isn’t yet a proven tactic that direct response-oriented advertisers can consistently use for customer acquisition. There are some managed service-like buying partners in the space, that work to varying degrees of efficiency for customer acquisition.

When it comes to choosing what types of shows to partner with, beyond budget and availability, it’s important to remember the obvious choice may not be the best one.

One of the most consistent, and pleasant, surprises in podcast advertising is how well shows that are seemingly unrelated to a product work well for customer acquisition. We’ve worked on products that had a primary target demographic of suburban moms, but guess what? Gamers want to stay at home and order snacks and food delivery, too; they have disposable income and are harder to reach via traditional channels.

If you’re advertising a product targeted to parents, you shouldn’t just test into parenting shows, you should also consider testing into shows with hosts who are parents, but have content not at all or tangentially related to parenting, like Your Mom’s House, with Tom Segura and Christina Pazsitzky. Sure, it’s a comedy podcast, and it’s NSFW (and hilarious). They’re also human parents who they do amazing reads, and their fans are legion.

Ryan Iyengar, CMO of HealthIQ, notes that “hosts with wildly different backgrounds were able to find a through-line to connect ad reads with their audiences, regardless of product line.” Of course, contextual advertising is worth consideration, and there are sometimes unique opportunities, but most successful shows aren’t a bullseye for content.

We’ve also seen the inverse, on contextual fit; food products can either do amazing or not well at all on food-related podcasts. If you have a food product with mass appeal, but one that (for example) many home cooks may already be familiar with, you may be better off doing just about any other popular genre of shows besides food.

Plus, these hosts are pros; they’ve been doing ad reads for everything from mattresses to meal kits for years. They know how to talk about your product in an engaging way.

Doug Hoggatt, the VP of Marketing at Betabrand, agrees, mentioning he would also coach new advertisers to “take the time to test across genres and hosts, you’ll be surprised at the results.” Iyengar is also the former VP of Marketing at ZipRecruiter; if you’ve ever heard a podcast, you may have heard the company advertised once or twice. He also notes, “[regardless of] content of the show, audiences can be interested in all sorts of topics, and are still potential customers. Yes, even hiring managers listen to comedy podcasts!”

Many business-to-business (B2B) advertisers do well in the channel, in part due to higher allowable CAC and high lifetime value (LTV). And the same point about show selection holds true for those audiences, as well. Visnick noted, “[HoneyBook] originally focused on testing industry-specific podcasts as those seemed to be the most natural way to target our prospective customers. We discovered that by diversifying our podcast mix into non-industry content we could still reach our target audience while also growing our reach and overall program performance.”

If we hear something that we think can help us at work, we’re amenable to that message, especially when it comes from our favorite host. Having an open mind to testing has helped so many advertisers unlock additional shows, and possible customers. You can take those insights back to other channels, too, and begin to integrate your campaigns and establish cross-channel frequency.

Pricing in the channel is unstable, and demand-based because inventory is finite; effective CPMs for host read, embedded mid-roll advertisements — by far, the most consistently performing ad unit for customer acquisition in the space — vary from $10 to $100. Yes, really.

Worrying too much about CPMs could mean that you’re leaving behind some of the best inventory in the space. So while it could make sense to cut higher CPM placements from a media plan, you want to be cautious. You could inadvertently cut out potential volume drivers or otherwise highly effective placements.

Allow for the host’s personality to shine through

Image via Getty Images / TwilightShow

The listener is there for the hosts. They relate to them, laugh with them, or laugh at them. They come to expect a performance from them, and often that performance bleeds into the ad reads. Whether it’s a semi-NSFW jingle about MeUndies from Bill Burr, or Joe Rogan recommending his mind-blowing NatureBox snack combination, or Levar Burton delivering an oh-so soothing Calm read.

Alan Abdine, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Rooster Teeth, a network with geeky, gamer shows with a hint of irreverence, said “the best ads are the ads that are organic, natural, and originate from the voice of the show talent. When brands allow our hosts to be themselves, there are more opportunities for entertaining side stories and commentary related to the brand.”

He continues to say his “belief is that if an advertiser is willing to spend money to reach out audience, then let us be the experts on that audience and let us use our own voice to share their message and talking points!  They will always get better results in that scenario.”

There is a certain special trust that goes into podcast ads. And to allow hosts to be themselves while also being a positive brand advocate often mean striking a balance between scripting and giving space. The most commonly purchased ad unit for customer acquisition advertisers is a host-read, embedded, mid-roll advertisement, typically :60 in length, but many hosts go over.

Overly scripting the copy can lead to an ad sounding inauthentic and infringe on their creativity. Kate Spencer, the co-host of Forever 35, notes that “often there are a lot of required talking points to hit in a short amount of time. We’re always happy to oblige, but I think it takes away from the organic and conversational nature of the ad, which is what makes podcast advertising especially unique. ”

On the flip side, not scripting enough could lead to a disjointed read where the host is trying to piece value props together on the fly. Nick Freeman, Chief Revenue Officer at Cadence13, explains that “some hosts do like the perfectly written out :60 script, while others like bullets they can riff off of.” Because podcast campaign test across multiple shows and personalities, it’s best to find a starting point in your copy where hosts can be guided, but not stifled. Freeman says “that doesn’t necessarily mean trying to make jokes for comedy hosts, for example, so much as it’s giving the hosts who do well with it the freedom to ad-lib.”

And for those that want to get a little more creative, the space is primed for custom integrations. Recently DoorDash partnered with Rooster Teeth for an ad on a livestream in celebration of a new game their studios were releasing. Since there was a visual element, DoorDash and Rooster Teeth partnered on a creative spin to the ad.

Instead of the typical copy, food would be delivered to the group of hosts while recording. Grant Durando, Senior Marketing Consultant at Right Side Up, works with DoorDash on their podcast campaign and stewarded this unique partnership. “[Rooster Teeth] approached us with the opportunity to engage with the live stream in a deeper way than just a regular podcast ad. It was definitely an unorthodox integration, but exciting to be in front of the right audience for DoorDash, at scale, and in a meaningful, memorable way. Many conversations about chicken nuggets later (which I never thought would be part of my job), Rooster Teeth and Vicious Circle delivered a superb ad experience, [integrating] multiple brand mentions and actually making DoorDash a part of the content itself.”

Zack Boone, Senior Director of Sales at Rooster Teeth, added there is, “nothing better than having clients that understand how impactful utterly stupid things like this can be for a brand.” DoorDash “[offers] industry-leading selection to our customers,” said Micah Moreau, VP of Growth Marketing at DoorDash. “It was incredibly effective to bring the DoorDash experience to life with Rooster Teeth in a highly differentiated, yet relevant way.”

How do you measure response?

Ads almost always end in some sort of call to action, like use the show’s promo code to save money, or visit a URL to get a free trial of a product for listeners of the show. It’s a way for shows to get credit for their listeners taking some sort of action, usually a purchase, related to hearing the ad.

And it’s how advertisers can figure out if their ad investments are paying back, too. Along those lines, Hoggatt was happy to see “how direct response the channel could be. I was surprised at the lift in site visits and follow-on orders that correlate so closely to when our podcasts drop.” Consumers have been conditioned to listen for that call to action at the end of an advertisement so we can measure a direct response in the channel.

That isn’t to say podcast advertising should displace a highly effective channel like paid social or paid search in your paid marketing testing priorities. We often ask advertisers information about their overall CAC or CPA  from other paid marketing efforts like Facebook or Google advertising, and use that data to benchmark target CAC for podcast.

As a general rule of thumb, if you can’t make Facebook or Google work for customer acquisition at meaningful scale, think twice before you engage in testing podcasts at a scale meaningful to your business. But if you’re looking for demand generating channels, podcast is an excellent contender.

“The success we’ve seen from podcast advertising has proven that we can drive sales through paid media outside of “traditional” direct digital response campaigns,” said Visnick. “We’ve significantly grown our podcast budget every quarter since we started testing the channel and it’s now a core part of our overall acquisition strategy and an important part of our media mix.

Don’t under-account for breakage or indirect activity

Image via Getty Images / Olivier Le Moal

Another challenge for advertisers that aren’t used to offline channels is managing indirect activity, also sometimes called breakage. It’s imperative to look at indirect activity to help triangulate response, as another way to get a false negative is to only look at direct response, i.e. direct redemptions of a promo code or sales from only users who visited the vanity URL.

A decent analog is like view-through conversions, but without the technology enablement. You can tell, via tracking, what actions site visitors have taken after exposure to ads on Facebook and Google, etc.

However, there isn’t a way for a consumer to tap or click on your podcast ad, so you don’t have a direct action correlated to ad download or exposure, nor can you track indirect activity (view-through) via pixels or other technology enablement. The aforementioned promo code/vanity URL combo is what generates that direct response.

To get around this breakage and triangulate a full response, advertisers commonly use a post-conversion attribution survey, colloquially referred to as a How Did You Hear About Us? or HDYHAU survey. This allows for a crude, but effective, translation of the impact that podcasts had on that user’s activity.

It helps you determine how much of the activity you’re capturing in paid search, for example, may have actually been driven by podcasts, streaming audio, or television. It’s self-reported data from users, sure, and it can feel a little shaky when you’re used to more precise digital measurement, but it’s how virtually every scaled advertiser in the channel has discovered a path to scale.

It also helps you determine benchmarks before you get into other channels, and can provide a solid look at multi-touch attribution if the survey is designed with best practices, and served to enough of the population to achieve stability.

Why can’t we use measurement techniques from other mediums?

We already talked about why, even though podcasts are digital audio, we can’t track conversions digitally (we know, it’s a little crazy). Unlike television, where you can use spot-based attribution, or radio, where you can achieve consistent ad exposure and but according to average quarter-hour (AQH) ratings, there’s a delay in both download of an episode and media consumption.

For advertisers, that means performance comes in over time, and it takes a minute to build reach and frequency (R/F). You may see very little activity for the first week or two of a campaign, and then as R/F builds and crescendos, you’ll see conversion activity catch up. That’s when you can start to get a solid picture of return on ad spend (ROAS); you should have structured your tests so you have a good sense of performance by the third or fourth drop with a show.

Looking at results sooner is possible but largely inadvisable. “Give it time,” says Dan Visnick, CMO at HoneyBook, “It can take a few weeks to see the impact from a single podcast, and months to build a strong portfolio.”

One of the biggest mistakes new advertisers in the channel make is getting a false positive, by testing into tiny shows that back out because 2 people bought their product, and then quickly scaling in the same genre only to find out that the content doesn’t scale.

False negatives are also common, when advertisers get cold feet in the first few weeks of an integration, and cancel shows after one ad insertion in a single episode. The channel requires diligence in testing, and if you have other business challenges to navigate, using digital growth channels can help iron out your messaging, landing pages, etc. before you launch offline channels.

Although you may have honed your messaging in other channels, you should expect to be flexible when it comes to podcast creative.

Opportunities to expand to other audio acquisition opportunities

Image via Getty Images / Anastasiia_New

Positive signals in podcast campaigns can also indicate that other audio channels may be ripe for testing, which can help diversify your marketing mix and minimize the pressure on individuals channels. Hoggatt says his “success in podcast advertising proved that it is possible to invest in offline channels and find measurable success.”

SiriusXM and streaming platforms, whether pureplay like Pandora or Spotify, or aggregators like Westwood One and ESPN, are great next steps for advertisers who see the right signals in podcast. For SiriusXM, it’s a high household income audience that are used to paying for a subscription (any subscription model companies out there?), and streaming audiences are choosing to listen to their content, similarly to how podcast listeners choose their content. The podcast landscape is the perfect arena to play in to learn more about how your brand works in offline media and allows there to be a stepping stone into other mediums.

Be good stewards

We know that podcast advertising can have a powerful impact on the marketing mix for companies of all sizes. As more and more players get involved in the space, it benefits all involved, from advertisers, to networks, to marketers.

It’s rare to have an opportunity to participate in a nascent medium, and be good stewards of one of the last remaining mediums on earth with finite inventory and listeners who actually respond to ads. And along the way, we hope to change the way people think about traditional offline media channels, like how they can be held to high growth performance standards, and where they intersect with popular digital growth tactics like paid social.

You’ll have to get creative, but with some trust and patience, and adherence to best practices, advertisers can reap significant benefits and customer acquisition, at scale, from podcast advertising campaigns.

9 things growth marketers should do when getting started:

• Create the team (and time!) needed to execute a campaign, whether in-house or via partnership with a subject matter expert like a consultancy or agency
• Learn the language of podcast advertising, terms like download carry a lot of baggage and understanding them can impact your campaign’s performance
• Budget your initial test(s) appropriately to avoid a false negative or positive result
• Have an open mind on show selection; make sure you test across multiple genres and formats
• Measure direct and indirect activity, to triangulate performance and business impact, and make optimizations and decisions on renewals
• Support, don’t stifle, the personality of the show hosts
• Get comfortable getting creative, and take time to onboard hosts
• Keep an eye out for additional opportunities, not only in podcast, but in other audio channels as well
• Be a good partner to shows, networks, and others in the space. It’s ours to nurture

SpaceX has completed joining the bottom and top halves of the Starship orbital-scale prototype it’s building in Boca Chica, Texas. The gleaming silver spacecraft, which is the “Mk 1” prototype that SpaceX will use for high-altitude testing, using three of the Raptor engines that will ultimately power the production version, saw its bottom and top halves mated on Friday ahead of an update that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will deliver on Saturday about the Starship program’s progress to date and next steps.

The prototype sports a slightly different design than we’ve seen in concept renders for the spacecraft, with two bottom fins and two fins near the top of the nose of the ship. These are designed to be used to help maneuver the vehicle during flight, especially during its controlled descent as it returns to Earth after missions, as Starship is intended to be a fully re-useable space vehicle. That reusability, along with the reusability of the Super Heavy booster being developed to propel it and its cargo to space, are key to SpaceX’s goals of eventually making humans truly multi planetary, and achieving some of the company’s more ambitious near-term goals, like achieving a permanent human presence on Mars.

Musk also shared photos of the three Raptor engines that will be installed on the Starship Mk1 prototype. Starship’s first prototype to fly was a subscale demonstration and testing vehicle codenamed “Starhopper,” which had only one Raptor engine and topped out at around 500 feet, as intended. The Mk1 will aim to reach as high as 63,000 feet in its own testing, which Musk has previously said should take place this year.

We’ll find out more about what’s next for the Starship program tomorrow, so check back right here on TechCrunch for updates live from Texas.

An eventful week on Capitol Hill is only the beginning of a very long road.

Most of the people I spoke with at Facebook’s Oculus Connect see the proliferation of virtual reality as a foregone conclusion, one that’s just a matter of timing at this point. For Facebook, the conference’s “The Time is Now” catchphrase showcased that they feel their hardware is ready for everyone.

But despite the success they feel like they’ve tapped into when it comes to hardware iterations, the company’s bread and butter social networking prowess feels like it’s barely improved in-headset in the past several years of VR experimentations.

“On the social side, looking back, it’s kind of embarrassing all of the stages we’ve gone through at Oculus,” Oculus CTO and veteran programmer John Carmack conceded onstage during his signature rambling annual keynote, noting that his own social APK was followed by Oculus Rooms, Oculus Venues, Facebook Spaces and now the company’s latest shiny pearl Facebook Horizon.

Horizon’s debut this year included a flashy trailer for what quickly seemed to be the company’s biggest gamble and first potential social hit, a massive multi-player online world. In introducing the software, Zuckerberg talked about people-centric software as Facebook’s “bread-and-butter,” noting, “We build a lot of the best social experiences for phones and computers, and we want to do this for virtual reality as well.”

But Facebook does not actually appear to hold that much of an advantage over much smaller game studios in terms of understanding how to make social virtual reality experience take off.

The drama of videogame development is finally being turned into prestige television. Also, Ninja was on ‘The Masked Singer’.

If you’re into live-streaming video games, you’ve probably heard of Streamlabs. They make a popular, free software tool for overlaying content on top of whatever game you’re playing, allowing streamers to pop everything from sponsorship logos to donation alerts on top of their video.

Logitech has acquired the company for roughly $89 million, plus $29 million in bonus payments if the team can hit “significant revenue growth targets.”

Streamlabs says that they have about 1.6 million streamers using their tool each month, with 161 million hours streamed through it since it launched in beta in January of 2018. They also have a mobile streaming app, which the company says has around 480,000 users.

The acquisition makes a good amount of sense. Logitech has been pushing into the space for some time now, with purpose-built hardware for gamers and streamers (like, say, webcams that auto-remove everything behind you for a greenscreen-style overlay effect). Now they’ve got the software to push people to after their hardware is all setup, and it’s already a proven solution.

In a post announcing the acquisition, Streamlabs founder Ali Moiz says that their tools will remain free, and they’ll continue to support any platform they already support today (so Windows, Android and iOS.)

Any iPhone device from 2011 to 2017 could soon be jailbroken, thanks to an underlying flaw that there’s no way to patch.

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.

1. Facebook tries hiding Like counts to fight envy

It looks like Facebook wants to end the terrible game of chasing Likes, and then the equally terrible feeling of failing.

The experiment starts today in Australia. A post’s author can still see the count, but everyone else will only be able to see who Liked a post, not how many Likes total it received.

2. DoorDash confirms data breach affected 4.9 million customers, workers and merchants

The breach happened on May 4, the company said, but added that customers who joined after April 5, 2018 are not affected. It’s not clear why it took almost five months for DoorDash to detect the breach.

3. My Galaxy Fold display is damaged after a day

Samsung’s new rebooted Galaxy arrives this week with one job: it just needs to not break. And yet …

4. 25+ launches from Uber’s big event

The company unveiled a slew of changes across all its products, designed to promote Eats and micromobility, make life easier for drivers, keep riders safe and make transportation more accessible. The big highlight? Two new visions for the future of Uber’s home screen.

5. ‘We are seeing volume and interest in Peloton explode,’ says company president on listing day

Despite dropping more than 10% in its first day of trading, the IPO was a bona fide success. Peloton, once denied (over and over again) by VC skeptics, now has hundreds of millions of dollars to take its business into a new era. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Director Ang Lee explains why he built a digital Will Smith in ‘Gemini Man’

Lee made things even harder for himself by shooting the movie in 3D, at 120 frames per second. In that format, everything looks more clear and detailed than in traditional film, so an unconvincing effect would be even more obvious.

7. Tesla V10.0 car software update adds Smart Summon, Netflix/YouTube, Spotify, karaoke and more

The new “Smart Summon” feature will allow cars equipped with the optional full self-driving package to automatically drive themselves from a parking spot and collect you in a parking lot.

Editor in Chief Nick Thompson and running expert Knox Robinson break down the highlights of the IAAF World Athletics Championships, which start tonight.

If you’re a founder facing a tough immigration question, we have a special workshop session for you next week at Disrupt SF. One of our resident legal experts, Sophie Alcorn, is going to be hosting a special workshop where you can ask any immigration question you may have.

She’s the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law, which has burgeoned into a boutique immigration firm for Silicon Valley startup people — as the already tricky U.S. immigration laws have gotten more difficult to get through in recent years. She’s also one of the most-recommended people in our Verified Experts program, with dozens of founders giving us a recommendation for her.

Here are some of the main topics she’s planning to cover. Email [email protected] so she can take a look at your questions beforehand:

• How scaling tech companies can leverage immigration options to secure key talent
• How startup founders can take immigration into their own hands to get visas and green cards (topics include: H-1B, O-1A, E-2, L-1A, EB-1A, EB-2 NIW, visa, work permit, green card, permanent residence, citizenship, spouses and children)
• What VCs should look for in founders to ensure that they can legally build companies in the U.S. and won’t be subject to deportation

If you’re interested in participating in this or any of our other workshops, make sure you pick up a pass to Disrupt SF right here.

Note: The workshop is open to all attendees and is on the record. Please let us know in your submission if you are concerned that your question is potentially too sensitive.

Trump has publicly played down Russia’s role in the 2016 election. But even privately, he trusts conspiracy theories more than US intelligence agencies.

Google today announced its plans to open a new cloud region in Warsaw, Poland to better serve its customers in Central and Eastern Europe.

This move is part of Google’s overall investment in expanding the physical footprint of its data centers. Only a few days ago, after all, the company announced that, in the next two years, it would spend $3.3 billion on its data center presence in Europe alone.

Google Cloud currently operates 20 different regions with 61 availability zones. Warsaw, like most of Google’s regions, will feature three availability zones and launch with all the standard core Google Cloud services, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner and BigQuery.

To launch the new region in Poland, Google is partnering with Domestic Cloud Provider (a.k.a. Chmury Krajowej, which itself is a joint venture of the Polish Development Fund and PKO Bank Polski). Domestic Cloud Provider (DCP) will become a Google Cloud reseller in the country and build managed services on top of Google’s infrastructure.

“Poland is in a period of rapid growth, is accelerating its digital transformation, and has become an international software engineering hub,” writes Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. “The strategic partnership with DCP and the new Google Cloud region in Warsaw align with our commitment to boost Poland’s digital economy and will make it easier for Polish companies to build highly available, meaningful applications for their customers.”