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Facebook tries to get less political, Oracle’s TikTok acquisition may not be happening and Twitter says Donald Trump is banned forever. This is your Daily Crunch for February 10, 2021.
The big story: Facebook tests a News Feed with less politics
Facebook announced today that it’s testing changes to the News Feed that would downrank political content. The company says the results will help determine how it treats such content in the future; content from health organizations and official government agencies will not be affected.
Two years ago, Facebook said it would be downranking publisher content in favor of content from family and friends, but this time it’s targeting politics specifically. For now, this test is only being conducted with a small group of users in select markets, including the United States, Canada, Brazil and Indonesia.
The tech giants
TikTok’s forced sale to Oracle is put on hold — The insane saga of a potential forced sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations is reportedly ending.
Twitter says Trump is banned forever, even if he runs for president again — “When you’re removed from the platform, you’re removed from the platform,” said Twitter CFO Ned Segal.
Apple Maps to gain Waze-like features for reporting accidents, hazards and speed traps — The new features are live in the iOS 14.5 beta.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Israeli startup CYE raises $100M to help companies shore up their cyber-defenses — CYE conducts offensive operations against their customers (with their permission) to find weaknesses before malicious hackers do.
SecuriThings snares $14M Series A to keep edge devices under control — This could include devices like security cameras, access control systems and building management systems.
Podz turns podcasts into a personalized audio newsfeed — A new company from an old Startup Battlefield winner, backed by Katie Couric and Paris Hilton.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Three adtech and martech VCs see major opportunities in privacy and compliance — We asked them to update us on whether deal flow has recovered, and to look ahead at the possibility of additional regulation.
Dear Sophie: How can I improve our startup’s international recruiting? — The latest edition of the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
How will investors value MetroMile and Oscar Health? — Last night, MetroMile and SPAC INSU Acquisition Corp. II completed their combination.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Ancestry says it fought two police requests to search its DNA database — Neither request resulted in the company turning over customer or DNA data.
NASA will use Fitbits to help prevent spread of COVID-19 to astronauts and employees — NASA will provide 1,000 of its employees, including 150 astronauts, with Fitbit devices in a pilot program.
EU’s top privacy regulator urges ban on surveillance-based ad targeting — The regulator is proposing that this ban be included in a major reform of digital services rules.
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 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/daily-crunch-facebook-tests-a-news-feed-with-less-politics/
Scalarr, a startup that says it uses machine learning to combat ad fraud, is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.
The company was founded by CEO Inna Ushakova and CPO Yuriy Yashunin, who previously led the mobile marketing agency Zenna. Ushakova told me that while at Zenna, they realized that ad fraud had grown to the point that it posed a real threat to their business.
At the same time, the team wasn’t impressed by any of the existing anti-fraud solutions, so it built its own technology. Eventually, they shut Zenna down completely and moved the entire team over to Scalarr.
The startup’s products include AutoBlock, which is supposed to detect fraud before the advertiser bids on an ad, and DeepView, which is used by adtech platforms (including ad exchanges, demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms).
Scalarr says it can detect 60% more fraud than existing products on the market and that it saved its clients $22 million in ad fraud refunds in 2020. Ushakova attributed this in large part to the startup’s extensive use of machine learning technology.
She added that while large ad attribution companies are adding anti-fraud products, they aren’t the focus. And historically, companies have tried to detect fraud through a “rules-based approach,” where there’s a list of behaviors that suggest fraudulent activity — but no matter how quickly they create those rules, it’s hard to keep up with the fraudsters.
“Fraud is ever evolving,” Ushakova said. “It’s like a Tom and Jerry game, so they are ahead of you and we are trying to catch them.”
As for why machine learning works is so much more effective, she said, “Only ML could help you predict the next step, and with ML, you should be able to detect abnormalities that are not classified. Right after that, our analytics should be able to take a look at those abnormalities and decide whether something significant statistically important.”
Scalarr’s Series A led by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, with participation from TMT Investments, OTB Ventures, and Speedinvest. Among other things, the company will use the money to expand its presence in Asia and to continue developing the product.
Today, there are a number of website builders aimed at creators who want to point fans to a dedicated landing page from their social media profile. If you’ve spent any time on TikTok or Instagram, you’ve likely come across one of these simplified “link in bio”-style websites — like those hosted by Linktree, for example. A new startup called Beacons is now entering this market with the goal of making “link in bio” websites even more powerful. Its website builder offers creators an expanded set of tools to monetize their community, including through donations, sales, paid requests, affiliate shopping and more.
After signing up for the service, Beacons walks the user through a series of questions, many which can be answered with just a “yes” or “no.” For example, Beacons may ask the user if they want to accept donations or collect followers’ emails, if they make TikTok or YouTube videos, and which category they’re in, in terms of the content they create.
This information is used to set up their Beacons landing page with the right content sections, which Beacons calls “blocks.” At launch, Beacons offers around a dozen of these configurable blocks, like email and SMS collection modules, video embed blocks for TikTok or YouTube creators, music blocks for embedding a track or album, a Twitter block to embed a tweet or Twitter profile, and link blocks, similar to Linktree, among others.
There’s even a “friends” block, which is like a modern-day Myspace Top 8. This lets you link out to your friends on either Beacons, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok.
An area where Beacons differentiates itself from other “link in bio” website builders, however, is with its set of “monetization” blocks. Today, it has four tools for creators who want to generate revenue from their online presence. One of these is similar to Cameo, as it allows the creator to set up a menu of options to take fan requests for personalized content. For instance, fans could ask a fitness influencer to critique their routine, or they could pay to have their burning questions answered by someone they admire. The creator can then send out a personalized response either publicly or privately.
Other monetization blocks allow creators to accept donations or sell digital downloads — like e-books or paid video content, for instance.
Image Credits: Beacons
The fourth, and perhaps most interesting, monetization block is a TikTok shopping feature. It allows creators to embed their TikTok videos where they recommend products directly on their Beacons website. From here, they can add affiliate links to the products in question, allowing them to directly generate revenue when fans purchase the items they’ve featured.
This particular feature comes at an opportune time. Today, TikTok is only beginning to formalize its plans around e-commerce. In a recent presentation to marketers, TikTok spoke of its plans to launch new online shopping tools that would allow brands to more directly reach TikTok’s younger audience. TikTok has also partnered with Shopify on social commerce, and has experimented with live video shopping, including with a holiday event hosted by Walmart.
But TikTok’s creators have already been driving shopping trends across categories like fashion, beauty, home décor, household items, toys and much more, to the point that “TikTok made me buy it,” has become a common excuse for the impulse purchases prompted by TikTok’s viral content. By allowing creators to now more directly and financially benefit from these trends is the next logical step.
Image Credits: Beacons
The idea for Beacons comes from co-founders Neal Jean, Jesse Zhang, Greg Luppescu and David Zeng. Neal, Jesse and David met while in the PhD program at Stanford studying different areas of research, like machine learning and AI. Greg, meanwhile, did his Master’s at Stanford, then went on to work at Apple on the Apple Watch team.
Neal, Jesse and David had teamed up on Beacons and went through the Y Combinator Summer 2019 batch, iterating on ideas and pivoting the product several times. Some of those early concepts may eventually return — like a Shopify integration that would connect creators with brands selling on Shopify, for example.
The broader focus, however, had always been on helping creators make money, says Neal.
“Even before our current product, we were really focused on trying to help creators solve monetization,” he explains. “When we kind of made this mini-pivot into the more Linktree-like product, we thought about building features that can help creators actually generate revenue — which I don’t think Linktree or any of the existing incumbents in the space were doing. Even today, you can’t actually make any money through Linktree,” he notes.
Linktree, of course, is only one of many “link in bio” websites on the market today, which means Beacons still faces a lot of competition. Other rivals include Linkin.bio, Lnk.bio, Shorby, Tap.bio, Feedlink.io, Link in Profile, Milkshake, Campsite, bio.fm, url.bio and biolincs.me, for example.
Unlike some of its competitors, Beacons offers its tools for free and instead monetizes through a premium plan ($10/mo) that allows creators to use their own custom domain. It also makes money by taking a percentage of sales on the requests and sales blocks, which is either 9% on the free plan or 5% on the paid plan. This rev share doesn’t bring in much money today — only “hundreds” of dollars — but the team believes that will scale as the startup grows and gains a large user base.
“Our strategy is…to continue building out more of these different kinds of revenue streams for creators,” says Neal. “And as we do that, I think, the fraction of transactional revenue will become higher relative to the subscription revenue than it is today.”
Since launching in private beta last September, Beacons has seen 90,000 sign-ups and now has over 20,000 people who are considered active users of the product — most arrived in the last couple of months when the service began to roll out some of its newer features. So far, Beacons hasn’t done any paid marketing, with around 77% of new users coming to Beacons because they saw it on someone else’s profile.
The team raised a small, post-YC angel round of around $600,000 but is looking to fundraise in the future.
The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut from NPR studios to USB Skype rigs (the latter of which has become a kind of default during the current pandemic).
We’ve asked some of our favorite podcast hosts and producers to highlight their workflows — the equipment and software they use to get the job done. The list so far includes:
Articles of Interest’s Avery Trufelman
First Draft and Track Changes’ Sarah Enni
RiYL remote podcasting edition
Family Ghosts’ Sam Dingman
I’m Listening’s Anita Flores
Broken Record’s Justin Richmond
Criminal/This Is Love’s Lauren Spohrer
Jeffrey Cranor of Welcome to Night Vale
Jesse Thorn of Bullseye
Ben Lindbergh of Effectively Wild
My own podcast, RiYL
Eleanor Kagan, Senior Producer, “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” Pineapple Street Studios. Image Credits: Eleanor Kagan
Launching today from Spotify and Pineapple Street Studios (in association with Gimlet), “Welcome to Your Fantasy” explores the true crime tale behind the Chippendales phenomenon of the 1980s. Historians and “Past/Present” hosts Natalia Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young will unravel the tale over the course of an eight-episode series. The show took 18 months to create, bolstered by considerable resources from Spotify. Pineapple Street Senior Producer Eleanor Kagan (Another Round, See Something Say Something and Thirst Aid Kit) runs us through the gear the team used to create the series both in-person and remotely, once the pandemic hit.
Dancer Scott Layne walks host Natalia through one of his routines during an interview. Image Credits: Eleanor Kagan
For in-person interviews not recorded in Pineapple’s Brooklyn studio, my basic reporting kit includes a Zoom H5, which has two XLR channels and allows me to give one Rode NTG-2 shotgun mic to the host Natalia and the other to the interviewee. (On mic stands, of course — the mic itself is prone to handling noise.) I’ve got a Rode pistol grip for when we, say, knock on doors in the neighborhood of the former Chippendales club in LA, looking for people who had been around when the party scene at the club was supposedly causing wars between the owners, neighbors and the police. (Luckily, we found Naomi, 94, who had been there since 1972 and had stories for days. She’s in the podcast.) Christine showed me how she brilliantly uses a cross-body camera strap attached to her recorder so she can hang it comfortably around her. For gear bags I used to swear by the Lowepro Passport Sling, but now that I’m older (lol), one-strapping isn’t comfortable for a long day in the field, so I use a regular backpack. My kit also includes Sony MDR-7506 headphones, an assortment of three- and six-foot XLR cables (always have backups), a deadcat, extra SD cards, an Electro Voice RE50/B mic, pens, snacks, release forms and batteries. So many batteries.
Producer Christine records historian Neil describing the LA neighborhood where the original Chippendales club opened. Image Credits: Eleanor Kagan
Then the pandemic hit. We all went on lockdown. We had done most of our interviews but there were a few we still needed, plus all the host tracking for the series. So we shipped Natalia a kit: a Zoom H6, a Shure SM7B cardioid dynamic announcer microphone, a CloudLifter CL-1 Microphone Activator, a broadcast arm, XLR cables and a windscreen. Natalia set up shop in her closet, surrounded by clothes, a fleece blanket on the floor, and as many cushions as she was willing to pull off her couches and chairs. (Sound bounces off of hard surfaces. The soft materials absorb it so the recordings won’t sound echoey or “roomy.”) We sent our amazing engineer Hannis Brown mic tests so he could diagnose the set-up from afar and suggest tweaks. And Natalia, bless her, was incredibly game to essentially become her own recording engineer ON TOP OF hosting an entire show. We quickly got accustomed to doing everything remotely and over Zoom, as all of us everywhere did.
Natalia’s closet studio. Image Credits: Eleanor Kagan
When it came to remote interviewing, we would connect over Zoom, and both Natalia and our interviewee would record themselves. (We always recorded the Zoom as a backup too.) It was up to us producers to talk our interviewees through self-syncing. Experience and teamwork was of the utmost importance here. Interviewees only had so much time, and explaining how to set up a recording on a smartphone (or iPod!, yes, really) and transfer a test recording quickly, and then troubleshooting any audio problems in their location was important to getting a high-quality interview without taxing anyone’s patience. There are several useful guides and graphics out there that walk through the set-up. There’s something a little bit lost, of course, when we don’t get to walk into people’s homes for interviews, or even when former Chippendales dancers can’t produce their original costume in the middle of the interview — as one guy did. But everyone was incredibly kind and patient and willing to do this for us, for which we are very, very grateful.
In the end, we interviewed about 70 people for this series. We wrote 26 drafts of our first episode. We reviewed 100+ hours of archival footage. And I believe there are still more stories to be told when it comes to Chippendales.
Thankfully, no matter where in the world anyone is, we have the tools to do it.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/how-i-podcast-welcome-to-your-fantasys-eleanor-kagan/
As a deep tech investor, I have often noticed that deep tech startups go through a different evolution cycle than a typical B2B or B2C company.
Accordingly, the challenges they face along the way are different — commercialization tends to be more complex and founders are often required to approach it differently.
Deep tech companies are usually built around a novel technology that offers significant advances over existing solutions in the market; often they create new markets that don’t yet exist. Taking these technologies from “lab to market” requires substantial capital carrying a much higher degree of risk than an average venture investment.
The majority of VCs are often surprised by the amount of complexity involved in building a successful deep tech company.
Typically, the underlying intellectual property (IP) of a deep tech company is unique and hard to recreate, resulting in a significant competitive advantage.
High risk, high reward
Since most deep tech companies are built around a fundamentally new and unproven technology, they carry higher risk. Typically, the tech has been tested in a lab or a research center and the early results are therefore often derived in a controlled environment. As a result, while building a product, founders are likely to encounter technical challenges along the way and won’t be able to eliminate the technology risk until later in the process.
By comparison, if a company is building a marketplace for used cars, for example, the technology risk is almost zero. Deep tech companies have the capability to create new markets with little competition and can replace existing technologies while fundamentally transforming an industry.
Microsoft, Nvidia, ARM, Intel and Google were all deep tech startups in the beginning. These companies will almost always require higher capital, carry higher risk and have longer time to return on investment.
However, if successful, they could deliver outsized returns over an average venture investment.
Technology-first approach
An obvious, but fundamental difference with deep tech companies is their technology-first approach. Typically, the founder has developed a novel technology or IP as part of their Ph.D. thesis or postdoc work and is in search for a real-world problem it can solve. Most startups, in general, pick an existing problem in a market they know well and develop a product that solves for that problem and they have a clear sense of the problem they need to solve.
Deep tech entrepreneurs take the opposite approach and as a result they often suffer from SISP (a solution in search of a problem), as Y Combinator calls it. Founders need to be aware of this and must be willing to pivot and repivot based on market and customer feedback. Investors should be prepared for this before backing the company and support the founders as they navigate through the challenges of building a successful deep tech company.
