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Yext Answers allows businesses to provide a better search experience on their own websites — but as the name implies, the goal is really to make sure consumers get the answers they’re looking for.
“If we deliver a link [in response to a search query], we consider it a failure on our side,” Chief Strategy Officer Marc Ferrentino told me.
Ferrentino said the company will be able to do an even better job of that starting on March 17, with the launch of the “Orion” update to its search algorithm.
Yext will then be able to pull answers directly from unstructured pages on a business’ website. The key, he said, is that Yext can “extract structured information” from an unstructured document — whether that’s a webpage, a blog post or a help document — rather than just searching for keywords. So instead simply presenting a link or a “blob of text,” it will offer a “rich snippet” that actually answers your question.
Image Credits: Yext
There’s a good chance that you’re familiar with something similar from Google’s consumer search experience, where the results often include a widget with questions and answers. Ferrentino welcomed the comparison, saying this will allow Yext customers to close the “experience gap” between Google’s search experience and their own.
To demonstrate the technology, Ferrentino showed me how Yext Answers could crawl pages about presidential history and then return the correct answer when asked, “Who was the only U.S. president to be impeached twice?”
Or for a more commercial (albeit slightly meta) example, he showed me how it could answer questions about Yext’s technology. As another example, Yext says it could search a bank’s website to answer a question about the difference between a 401(k) and Roth IRA.
And Yext co-founder and President Jon Brod noted that this change won’t just improve things for business and their customers, but also Yext’s non-profit clients, including the World Health Organization, which is using Yext to provide pandemic-related answers online.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/yext-answers-orion/
Each year, millions of students in India rush to get an admission in universities abroad. Often they don’t know which program they should focus on, or the college that is right for their skillset and ambition.
Scores of legacy and newfound firms are attempting to offer counselling to these students. But despite India contributing more international students than any other country, most firms aiming to address this challenge are not focused on India, and struggle to understand some unique problems students in the world’s second most populous country face.
An Indian startup that is bridging this gap on Thursday said it has raised $6.5 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its platform in the world’s second largest internet market.
Leverage Edu said Tomorrow Capital led the Delhi-headquartered startup’s Series A financing round. Existing investors Blume Ventures and DSG Consumer Partners also participated in the round.
Akshay Chaturvedi, founder and chief executive of Leverage Edu, told TechCrunch in an interview that he believes that eventually the firm that is going to serve the students best and emerge most successful will be the one that is physically closer to them, and not to the universities.
Chaturvedi, 30, began exploring this idea for this startup in 2015 and spent a little more than a year experimenting with different models. One of the earliest iterations of Leverage Edu offered mentorship to students and rewarded counselors with points.
Today, the startup offers a broad range of services in addition to offering personalized mentorship. Through its workshops, it helps students find the right college, guides them with complex applications and grade conversions, as well as assists with education loan, VISA, and accommodation. “It’s one digital dashboard. You get everything from flight tickets to local phone numbers, to education loan in one place,” he said.
“We believe it is inevitable that the next stellar brand in the global cross-border education space will be a home-grown one. We have a great belief in Akshay as a founder – he has a fantastic roadmap for scaling the business and the passion to build a truly global Indian edtech brand – and are excited about working with the Leverage Edu team on this journey,” said Rohini Prakash, chief executive of Tomorrow Capital, in a statement.
Leverage Edu helps students land admission in the most prestigious colleges, but also works with those that didn’t score the most marks.
“Students going to the top colleges is just 10% of the potential audience,” explained Chaturvedi, who spent his teen years attending talks from startup founders and also made money by bringing more people to those talks. “There are many universities that don’t have the best branding. To connect them with students, we have our SaaS offering Univalley.com,” he said.
The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to help students find colleges in more geographies including the UK and Australia, he said.
“We want to focus on a few things and do them really really well. There is also this myth around foreign education being expensive that we’ve been busting for last four years. 18 months from now, we want to be among the top study abroad companies in India, both by number of students and a roof-hitting NPS – because a happy student is why we are all really motivated everyday to do this!”, he added.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/indias-college-admission-platform-leverage-edu-raises-6-5-million/
Each year, millions of students in India rush to get an admission in universities abroad. Often they don’t know which program they should focus on, or the college that is right for their skillset and ambition.
Scores of legacy and newfound firms are attempting to offer counselling to these students. But despite India accounting for more students than any other country, most firms aiming to address this challenge are not focused on India, and struggle to understand some unique problems students from the world’s second most populous country face.
An Indian startup that is bridging this gap on Thursday said it has raised $6.5 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its platform in the world’s second largest internet market.
Leverage Edu said Tomorrow Capital led the Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s Series A financing round. Existing investors Blume Ventures and DSG Consumer Partners also participated in the round.
Akshay Chaturvedi, founder and chief executive of Leverage Edu, told TechCrunch in an interview that he believes that eventually the firm that is going to serve the students best and emerge most successful will be the one that is physically closer to them, and not to the universities.
Chaturvedi, 30, has been experimenting with the right model for his startup for over five years. One of the earliest iterations of Leverage Edu offered mentorship to students and rewarded counselors with points.
Today, the startup offers a broad range of services in addition to offering personalized mentorship. Through its workshops, it helps students find the right college, guides them with complex applications and grade conversions, as well as assists with education loan, VISA, and accommodation. “It’s one digital dashboard. You get everything from flight ticket to local phone number, to education loan in one place,” he said.
“We believe it is inevitable that the next stellar brand in the global cross-border education space will be a home-grown one. We have a great belief in Akshay as a founder – he has a fantastic roadmap for scaling the business and the passion to build a truly global Indian edtech brand – and are excited about working with the Leverage Edu team on this journey,” said Rohini Prakash, chief executive of Tomorrow Capital, in a statement.
Leverage Edu helps students land admission in the most prestigious colleges, but also works with those that didn’t score the most marks and find high-profile colleges.
“Students going to the top colleges is just 10% of the potential audience,” explained Chaturvedi, who spent his teen years attending talks from startup founders and also made money by bringing more people to those talks. “There are many universities that don’t have the best branding. To connect them with students, we have Univalley.com,” he said.
The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to help students find colleges in more geographies including UK and Australia, he said.
“We want to focus on a few things and do them really really well. There is also this myth around foreign education being expensive that we’ve been busting for last four years. 18 months from now, we want to be among the top study abroad companies in India, both by number of students and a roof-hitting NPS – because a happy student is why we are all really motivated everyday to do this!”, he added.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/indias-college-admission-platform-leverage-edu-raises-6-5-million/
With offline events now firmly moved to online for the foreseeable future, startups in the networking space had to pivot fast in the face of the pandemic. One of those was Grip, previously better known as a networking app for physical conferences (including TechCrunch Disrupt, at one point). Since last year, Grip moved into an ‘omnichannel’ experience, combining various event types across virtual, hybrid, and live. That strategy appears to have paid off as it has now raised a $13 million Series A funding round, taking its total amount raised to $14.5 million.
The round was led by London-based growth equity fund Kennet Partners. The raise is reflective of the boom in online events, which saw London-based startup Hopin raise a $40m Series A last year. Founded in 2016, Grip counts some large event organizers as clients including Reed Exhibitions and Messe Frankfurt.
In a statement Tim Groot, CEO and founder of Grip, said: “Our mission is to empower organizers to bring professionals together to advance industries. This funding round is going to enable us to take the experience to a new level, leveraging our extensive industry-leading platform, offering unique value for Virtual, Hybrid and In-Person events.”
He said they would now be investing heavily in the product and looking to global expansion.
Other competitors to Grip have, in the past, included Brella which raised $1.5m, and Swapcard which raised $6m to date.
So why is it that Grip seems to have pulled away from pack in this way?
Groot told me: “We took a slightly different approach in that we managed to work in a plug-and-play method alongside other platforms. So grip gets used as a standalone virtual event platform by lots of these organizers. So they might use Hopin for the conference but Grip for the networking. So maybe we managed to get more traction that way, over the course of 2020.”
In 2020, following the pivot to virtual events, Grip hosted over 100 events a month and was used by 1.5m people. As a result, the company says revenue grew almost 4x in 2020, and this year it expects to do over 10,000 events on its platform with over 5 million participants.
Grips AI-powered algorithms mean attendees get more personalized matchmaking recommendations based on their interests, including pre-event meeting scheduling. For exhibitors, the software captures business leads and provides post-event analytics.
People can be added to meetings to have group conversations and the startup is also working on a topic-based “speed networking” functionality to hold instant 3 minute conversations.
Grip integrates with various streaming platforms such as Vimeo, Youtube, Zoom, BlueJeans and others, unlike “full-service” platforms such as Hopin or Bizzabo.
Hillel Zidel, Partner at Kennet and Grip board member, added: “Grip’s ability to organize virtual events with a key focus on networking has meant that the company has seen tremendous growth over the last year. Event organizers and their clients have been able to remain connected with their customers despite the constraints on in-person events. As live events resume in the future, Grip is extremely well-positioned to continue to assist event organizers through the provision of software solutions supporting live, virtual and hybrid events.”
Brent Hoberman, co-founder of Founders Factory and a previous investor, said: “Grip was born out of a need we saw in running events at Founders Forum – how do you use smart technology to catalyze the most relevant and valuable connections between your guests?”
The advance of short videos is reshaping how information is created, disseminated and consumed online. Snappy 15-second videos aren’t just for entertainment. On Chinese short-video apps Douyin and Kuaishou, people can get their daily dose of news, learn to cook, practice English, hunt for jobs, and seek practically any type of information from the platforms’ quickly expanding content library.
While people are increasingly used to being fed by machine-recommended videos, many users still have the urge and need for active searching. Douyin understood that and incorporated a search function back in mid-2018. More than two years later, the feature reached 550 million monthly active users. There’s still room for Douyin’s search feature to grow, as the app last reported 600 million daily users in September, so its monthly user base should be above that.
Kelly Zhang, the young product manager credited for the rise of Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, disclosed Douyin’s search user figure for the first time this week on her microblogging account. Search is a territory that had long been dominated by Baidu in China. As of December, Baidu’s flagship app had 544 million monthly active users, so it’s safe to say as many people are searching on Douyin as on Baidu.
Zhang’s remark is telling of Douyin’s ambition in conquering the online video sector, and eventually how people receive information: “I have said this before: I hope Douyin could become the video encyclopedia for human civilization. Video search is, therefore, the index of the book, the gateway to finding answers and reaping new knowledge.”
She further added that Douyin’s search engine is hiring for research and development, product, and operational roles in the upcoming year (China has just observed the Lunar New Year) as the video app continues to ramp up investment in search capabilities.
Short video platforms are already the second-most popular method for Chinese users to search online, trailing only after general search engines like Baidu and coming ahead of social networks and e-commerce, data analytics firm Jiguang said in a report last December. Baidu’s command of search is increasingly limited by the walled gardens built up by Chinese tech titans who block one another from free access to its sites and data. The status quo harms user experience but bodes well for vertical search engines on apps like Douyin and Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace, and consequently revenues from ad sponsorships.
ByteDance cut its teeth on using machine learning algorithms to recommend content through services like Douyin, TikTok and news aggregator Toutiao. The model proved highly efficient and lucrative, prompting its predecessors from Baidu to Tencent to introduce similarly algorithm-powered content feeds. ByteDance’s move into search, a realm with a longer history, is an intriguing yet natural step. The firm is just completing the puzzle for its digital media empire, giving people another option to find information. Users can receive machine recommendations and subscribe to content creators if they want. They can as well put in a search keyword if they have one in mind, the good old way.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/17/short-video-search-douyin-tiktok/
