User blogs

Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace, has been around for over 15 years and is often a core knowledge-sharing tool for the companies that implement it. But for the most part, Confluence is a business tool and looks like it, with walls of text and the occasional graph, table or image. But user expectations have changed and so it’s maybe no major surprise that Atlassian is now bringing a stronger emphasis on design to the service.

Today’s update, for example, brings features like cover images, title emojis and customizable space avatars (that is, “icons that denote a ‘space’ or section of Confluence”) to the service. The team also recently introduced smart links, which allow you to paste links from services like YouTube and Trello and have the service immediately recognize them and display them in their native format. Other new features include the ability to schedule when a new page is published and the ability to convert pages to blog posts (because, as it turns out, Atlassian has seen a bit of a resurgence in corporate blogging — mostly for internal audiences — during the pandemic).

Image Credits: Atlassian

“We ended up doing something that we called ‘love sprint,’ where we prioritize about 30 features for the enhancements, which are all — if you think about the themes — about how you design information in this world where you have to read more, where you have to write more,” Natalia Baryshnikova, the Head Of Product Management for Atlassian’s Confluence Experience Group, told me. “And there’s the attention span that’s kind of pushing its limits. So how do you design for that situation? How do you discover our content?”

Baryshnikova tells me that the team took a close look at how content production, management and delivery works in the social media world. But some of the new features are also purely a reaction to a changing work environment. Take the ability to schedule when pages are published, for example. Employees who work from home may work especially late or early right now, for example, in order to prioritize childcare. But they still want the content they produce to be seen inside the company and that can be hard when you would otherwise publish it at 11pm, for example.

Image Credits: Atlassian

And having your content get noticed is getting harder because Confluence usage has dramatically increased in the last twelve months. As Atlassian noted today, over 60,000 companies are now using the service. And inside those companies, those users are also far more active than ever before. The number of Confluence pages created from March 2020 to March 2021 increased by more than 33 percent. The average user now creates 11 percent more pages, but the product’s superusers have often doubled or tripled their output.

The use of Confluence has also helped many companies reduce their number of meetings, but as Baryshnikova noted, “not only are pages competing with meetings — but pages are competing with pages.” So using good graphics, for example, is a way for a user’s content to stand out in the noise of corporate content production. Which, I have to admit, strikes me as a somewhat strange dynamic. But I guess that just like on the web, in order to stand out in a corporate environment, you have to make the documents you produce stand out in order to get noticed. Maybe that — as well as the lack of watercooler conversations — is also the reason why corporate blogging is seeing an uptick right now.

Amazon is expanding customer deliveries via electric cargo vehicle to San Francisco, making the Bay Area the second of 16 total cities the company expects to bring its Rivian-sourced EVs to in 2021. 

San Francisco’s unique terrain and climate were a couple of the reasons Amazon said it chose the city for its second round of testing. Its EVs, which were designed and built in partnership with Rivian, can last up to 150 miles on a single charge. 

Amazon began testing its electric delivery van in Los Angeles in early February as part of its Climate Pledge, which involves the purchase of 100,000 custom electric delivery vehicles. The company first unveiled the vans last October, and has said it aims to have 10,000 of the vehicles operational by next year. 

Bay Area deliveries will initially come out of Amazon’s station in Richmond, California, just one of the many delivery stations the e-commerce giant is redesigning to service its new fleet of EVs. A recent $200 million investment into a new delivery station in the heart of San Francisco signals Amazon’s push to significantly increase deliveries in the city. 

“From what we’ve seen, this is one of the fastest modern commercial electrification programs, and we’re incredibly proud of that,” said Ross Rachey, director of Amazon’s global fleet and products in a statement.

Amazon isn’t the only company to recognize the logic behind electrifying delivery fleets for short trips within cities: DHL says zero-emission vehicles already make up 20% of its fleet, UPS has placed an order for 10,000 EVs and FedEx has pledged to replace 100% of its fleet with electric vehicles by 2040. 

The B2B payments space has been on fire for a while, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only fueled mass adoption of digitizing finances.

In regions like Latin America, the need for innovation in the sector is even more paramount than in the United States with so many people still relying on outdated processes.

One Mexico City-based startup, Higo.io, is out to transform B2B payments for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) in Latin America, starting with its home country.

Rodolfo Corcuera, Juan José Fernández and Daniel Tamayo founded the company in January 2020, recognizing that the process of paying vendors for business owners is largely “manual and cumbersome.”

“In Mexico, small businesses mostly handle payables with nothing more than spreadsheets and email and legacy bank accounts,” CEO Corcuera said.

The trio formed Higo to automate processes and provide visibility into cash flow, particularly for small businesses. “Informal” businesses make up about 23% of Mexico’s GDP, according to data from INEGI, the government’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography. Higo launched its SaaS platform last November.

And now the startup has raised $3.3 million from a group of U.S.-based investors including Homebrew (which led the round), Susa Ventures, Haystack and J Ventures. The financing is the latest in a string of fintech-related fundings in Mexico that TechCrunch has covered as of late.

Higo wants shake up the payments scene in the region by creating an alternative to traditional banking for businesses to pay each other. 

“We want to build the Venmo for B2B payments in Latin America,” Corcuera told TechCrunch. 

Ultimately, the goal is to help SMB owners deal less with tedious tasks and more on generating revenues and profits for their businesses. Customers so far include hundreds of small business owners and the company aims to have “thousands” of customers by year’s end.

“E-invoicing is ubiquitous in the States and in the U.S., receiving a PDF invoice is enough,” Corcuera told TechCrunch. “But in Mexico, it has to be electronic to be [tax] deductible by law. With our platform, invoices are automatically populated so businesses can have visibility into what has to be paid, what vendors they owe and when they owe.”

Corcuera is no stranger to running companies, having launched a housecleaning marketplace at the age of 23 in 2013. He also founded Tandem, an office management platform, in 2018, to help office managers streamline their procurement needs. As is often the case for founders, it was during the process of growing that company that Corcuera realized how painful and time consuming it was for businesses to manage their payables and receivables. That led him to come up with the concept behind Higo.io. 

Gallardo was previously COO at Swap, a Mexican challenger bank, and also was one of the founding members of Uber’s Mexican operations.

Looking ahead, Higo plans to use its new capital in part to boost its six-person staff, particularly beefing up its engineering team so that it can “scale as fast as possible,” according to Corcuera.

For now, the company’s efforts are focused exclusively on the Mexican market, which in of itself is huge.

“Later we will expand in Latin America. We see a very clear opportunity in similar markets across the region,” Corcuera said.

Homebrew Partner Satya Patel said his San Francisco-based VC firm believes there’s a massive opportunity in Latin America given the move to digital payments. The investment in Higo marks Homebrew’s third in the region in the past 18 months.

“This is an exceptional team focused on a problem that is visceral for businesses in Mexico in particular,” Patel told TechCrunch. “They are able to provide businesses with a real-time view of their cash flow and working capital. Without it, they are at risk. So the opportunity is to tackle this acute pain point being felt by a lot of businesses.”

The region’s payments ecosystem, he said, is still very nascent.

“Being the intermediary for B2B tax information gives Higo an opportunity to provide a real alternative to the traditional way Mexicans are used to doing banking and business,” Patel added.

Kosta Eleftheriou, a co-founder of the Fleksy keyboard app later sold to Pinterest in an acqui-hire deal, has been calling attention to Apple App Store issues like fake reviews, ratings and subscription scams, as well as malicious clone apps, after his own app, FlickType, was targeted by scammers. Now, the developer is taking the next step in his App Store crusade: he’s filing a lawsuit against Apple.

The suit, which the developer claims was filed Wednesday in California Superior Court in Santa Clara county, alleges that Apple enticed developers to build applications for its App Store — the only place iOS applications can be legally sold — by claiming it’s a safe and trustworthy place, but doesn’t protect legitimate app developers against scammers profiting from their hard work.

What’s more, the suit says, Apple is disincentivized to do so because scammers are generating revenue for Apple via their use of subscriptions, which involve a revenue share with Apple.

Eleftheriou has been personally impacted by App Store scammers. He left a well-paying job at Pinterest to develop his FlickType app, an alternative swipe keyboard for Apple Watch. After its launch, the app targeted by copycat app makers who claim their apps offer the same feature set as FlickType does, but instead lock users into high priced subscriptions for their poorly designed software. They also flood their apps with fake ratings and reviews to make them appear to be a much better option when users are looking for an app in this space.

Meanwhile, FlickType sports a 3.5-star rating, as it’s often dinged for Apple Watch platform issues that are outside the developer’s control or missing features users want to call attention to. Eleftheriou engages with his app’s users, however — responding to complaints and letting users know when features they’ve requested were added or bugs have been fixed. Scammers simply buy enough 5-star reviews to keep their apps’ overall ratings higher.

In other words, Eleftheriou is doing the hard work of being an App Store developer carving out a category for swipe keyboards for the Watch, but his potential income is being shifted over to scam apps who have a falsified App Store presence.

In years past, Apple took issues of app quality seriously. It worked to clean up shady subscription apps and remove clones and spam from the App Store through regular sweeps. It even once went so far as to ban apps built using templates in an effort to raise the bar on app quality, which angered small businesses who didn’t have the resources or funds to build more professional apps. (Apple later revised its policy to be more equitable.)

But the new lawsuit alleges that Apple is now doing little to police scammers’ apps because it profits from developer misconduct. Eleftheriou also notes he has raised these issues to Apple via his company KPAW, LLC, but Apple did “next to nothing” to resolve the problem.

Eleftheriou’s story is even more complicated, though, because his app was rejected from the App Store numerous times after meeting with Apple special projects manager Randy Marsden over a possible acquisition. He tells TechCrunch numbers were discussed with Apple and his meetings had included a Director and a VP, among others. Apple was considering turning FlickType into an Apple Watch feature, the lawsuit notes.

Shortly thereafter, FlickType was pulled from the App Store over App Store Review Guidelines violations, even as a competitor’s app was approved. Eleftheriou appealed for his app through Developer Relations but was given no guidance on how to prevent the same problem in the future, he said.

Over the months that followed, FlickType continued to face rejections from App Store Review. Apple’s App Store Review said that the app offered a “poor user experience,” even though tech journalists at numerous outlets had praised it, and Apple had once considering buying it. App Review also told the developer that “full keyboard apps are not appropriate for Apple Watch,” while it continued to allow competitors to publish their own keyboard apps.

Apple’s App Review team also allowed third-party apps that were running FlickType’s integratable version of the keyboard to be approved without issues. These included Watch apps like Nano for Reddit, Chirp for Twitter, WatchChat for WhatsApp, and Lens for Instagram.

After Apple approved FlickType in January 2020, the company claims it had already lost over a year of revenue to competitor keyboards that were not constantly being rejected. Nevertheless, FlickType reached the App Store’s Top 10 Paid app list and generated $130,000 in its first month. As a result of its success, it was quickly targeted by scammers who launched watered down, barely usable competitors to the app, cutting into FlickType’s revenue. FlickType’s revenue dropped to just $20,000 per month. The competitors were also using fake ratings to get their app boosted and installed by unsuspecting users.

Eleftheriou’s story was not unique, as it turned out. In recent months, he has been documenting the App Store’s multimillion-dollar scams, including those he was facing as well as others brought to his attention by developers with similar struggles. Apple, in some cases, would take action against the scammers he highlighted on social media. In other cases, it would not. And it would sometimes only take down one of the developer’s scam apps, but allow others under the same developer account to continue to operate.

The new lawsuit aims to hold Apple accountable for the issues Eleftheriou faced by asking Apple to restore his lost revenue and pay out any other damages awarded by the court.

Apple has not responded for a request for comment at this time.

A copy of the lawsuit is below. It is not yet appearing in public record searches for verification purposes. We’ll follow up to confirm when the case appears online and update accordingly.

Kpaw, LLC v. Apple, Inc by TechCrunch on Scribd

SecurityScorecard has been helping companies understand the security risk of its vendors since 2014 by providing each one with a letter grade based on a number of dimensions. Today, the company announced a $180 million Series E.

The round includes new investors Silver Lake Waterman, T. Rowe Price, Kayne Anderson Rudnick, and Fitch Venture along with existing investors Evolution Equity Partners, Accomplice, Riverwood Capital, Intel Capital, NGP Capital, AXA Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures) and Boldstart Ventures. The company reports it has now raised $290 million.

Company co-founder and CEO Aleksandr Yampolskiy says the company’s mission has not changed since it launched. “The idea that we started the company was a realization that when I was CISO and CTO I had no metrics at my disposal. I invested in all kinds of solutions where I was completely in the dark about how I’m doing compared to the industry and how my vendors and suppliers were doing compared to me,” Yampolskiy told me.

He and his co-founder COO Sam Kassoumeh likened this to a banker looking at a mortgage application and having no credit score to check. The company changed that by starting a system of scoring the security posture of different companies and giving them a letter grade of A-F just like at school.

Today, it has ratings on more than 2 million companies worldwide, giving companies a way to understand how secure their vendors are. Yampolskiy says that his company’s solution can rate a new company not in the data set in just five minutes. Every company can see its own scorecard for free along with advice on how to improve that score.

He notes that in fact, the disastrous SolarWinds hack was entirely predictable based on SecurityScorecard’s rating system. “SolarWinds’ score has been lagging below the industry average for quite a long time, so we weren’t really particularly surprised about them,” he said.

The industry average is around 85 or a solid B in the letter grade system, whereas SolarWinds was sitting at 70 or a C for quite some time, indicating its security posture was suspect, he reports.

While Yampolskiy didn’t want to discuss valuation or revenue or even growth numbers, he did say the company has 17,000 customers worldwide including 7 of the 10 top pharmaceutical companies in the world.

The company has reached a point where this could be the last private fundraise it does before going public, but Yampolskiy kept his cards close on timing, saying it could happen some time in the next couple of years.