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Today, two giants of the cannabis industry are announcing a partnership to create an improved retail experience for consumers and dispensaries alike. Through this partnership, Leafly and Jane’s technology solutions will offer dispensaries powerful tools to sync online e-commerce with in-store inventory — something that is sorely lacking in the cannabis world.
Legal weed shoppers know the pain. A handful of different apps report to show the inventory of local dispensaries and often do not line up with the store’s real-time inventory. What’s more, sometimes other dispensaries have different ways of listing the same product. There’s a good reason for the dispensaries: there’s not an industry standard UPC barcode and the dispensaries often have hundreds of fast-moving SKUs from dozens of vendors.
Leafly and Jane’s partnership seeks to solve the pain on both sides of the counter. Jane’s technology enables dispensaries to build a modern e-commerce platform through automation and machine learning. Jane’s technology will soon be built into Leafly’s Menu Solutions that works with over 30 point-of-sale systems. This should result in less tedious work for the dispensaries and a much more consistent online experience for the shopper.
Jane and Leafly have deep inroads into the cannabis world. According to this announcement’s press release, over the past year, Jane’s solution powered over 17 million orders and $2 billion in cannabis sales. Over 1,800 dispensaries and brands use Jane. Likewise, in 2020, more than 4,500 cannabis retailers used Leafly’s platform, and the company saw 120 million visitors to its online marketplace.
Despite the successes, Leafly experienced a turbulent 2020 with layoffs and leadership changes. Yoko Miyashita took over as the company’s CEO in August 2020 and has been focused on Leafly leaning heavily into building a better online shopping experience.
Right now, in early 2021, there isn’t an Amazon of weed or even a Shopify of weed for several reasons, but primarily because the cannabis industry is still under a federal prohibition. This solution pushes the cannabis industry closer to a modern e-commerce business. With Jane’s ability to standardize and auto-populate product listings, and Leafly’s deep point of sale integrations, both the consumer and dispensary sees benefits.
TechCrunch spoke to Leafly and Jane’s CEOs on this partnership. It’s clear that the two are excited about this project and see this partnership as a watershed moment for retail cannabis.
“[Dispensaries] don’t have a solution that can be seamless like a Shopify or Amazon,” Jane’s CEO Socrates Rosenfeldsaid. “I think, together with Jane’s ability to cleanse information in real-time, and essentially automate e-commerce for large brick and mortar selling sellers, combining that with Leafly’s consumer marketplace, we are making shopping for cannabis as simple as shopping on Amazon.”
TK explained that he sees this partnership goes behind an Amazon-like shopping experience. He sees this as a way of returning value and protecting local dispensaries by empowering them with technology.
“The problems in cannabis are unique enough, and the plant has a complexity that we want to honor,” Leafly CEO Yoko Miyashita said. We don’t think we can get there with antiquated ways of doing things. It’s bringing the intentionality around shared values to innovate and ultimately empower the communities that we serve.”
Identity and access management service Okta today launched its new design system, both for its own corporate and brand use, but also as an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license. The Odyssey Design System, as the company calls it, is similar to the likes of Google’s Material Design or Microsoft’s Fluent Design. It may not have quite the same number of features, but what makes it stand out is a focus on accessibility, with every element of the design system being compliant with the W3’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Brian Hansen, Okta’s SVP of Design, told me that until now, the company didn’t really have a unified design system. Instead, it had what he called a “glorified pattern library.” And while the engineers loved it, because it allowed them to build new UIs quickly, it was hard for the team to add new patterns. “And so it was limited in what it could do,” Hansen said. “And what you ended up having to do sometimes is compromise — particularly as a designer — and kind of shove the square peg into the round hole.”
Image Credits: Okta
Now that Okta has moved beyond its early startup roots, though, the team decided that it was time to go back to the drawing board and build a more fully-featured design system for the company — and you may soon see it yourself in Okta’s sign-in widget, which is where most users are likely to encounter it. But it’s worth remembering that Okta, the platform, also offers a plethora of backend tools for admins that most users never see. Those admins typically want a very information-dense user experience and a design that makes it easy for them to get things done and move on. Okta’s third group of users, Hansen stressed, is developers and what matters a lot to them — in addition to all the technical details — is documentation, which has to be easily readable (from a design perspective).
As Hansen noted, though, internally, it wasn’t a realistic project to simply switch every surface area to Odyssee at once. “As a designer, you want everything to be perfect all at once. But you also have to be pragmatic and live with some things that aren’t perfect,” he acknowledged. So while the Okta brand is now getting this refresh and some of the user-facing services, it’ll take a while before every Okta service can make this move.
For the admin console, for example, Hansen’s team decided that it would take years to switch out the UI. So instead, the team opted for a bridge strategy where it created the style sheets to essentially mimic the Odyssee design. “Then we can cut over to Odyssee-native components and they’ll blend in. We can’t have a Franken app — we can’t have two different generations of UI coexisting. That to me just ruins trust. No one would be happy with that,” Hansen said.
Developers who want to give Odyssee a try for their own projects can do so and explore the different components it has to offer. And designers can try it out in Figma, too.
Microsoft today launched Viva, a new “employee experience platform,” or, in non-marketing terms, its new take on the intranet sites most large companies tend to offer their employees. This includes standard features like access to internal communications built on integrations with SharePoint, Yammer and other Microsoft tools. In addition, Viva also offers access to team analytics and an integration with LinkedIn Learning and other training content providers (including the likes of SAP SuccessFactors), as well as what Microsoft calls Viva Topics for knowledge sharing within a company.
If you’re like most employees, you know that your company spends a lot of money on internal communications and its accompanying intranet offerings — and you then promptly ignore that in order to get actual work done. But Microsoft argues that times are changing, as remote work is here to stay for many companies, even after the pandemic (hopefully) ends. Even if a small percentage of a company’s workforce remains remote or opts for a hybrid approach, those workers still need to have access to the right tools and feel like they are part of the company.
Image Credits: Microsoft
“We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a pre-recorded video. “As the world recovers, there is no going back. Flexibility in when, where and how we work will be key.”
He argues that every organization will require a unified employee experience platform that supports workers from their onboarding process to collaborating with their colleagues and continuing their education within the company. Yet as employees work remotely, companies are now struggling to keep their internal culture and foster community among employees. Viva aims to fix this.
Unsurprisingly, Viva is powered by Microsoft 365 and all of the tools that come with that, as well as integrations with Microsoft Teams, the company’s flagship collaboration service, and even Yammer, the employee communication tool it acquired back in 2012 and continues to support.
There are several parts to Viva: Viva Connections for accessing company news, policies, benefits and internal communities (powered by Yammer); Viva Learning for, you guessed it, accessing learning resources; and Viva Topics, the service’s take on company-wide knowledge sharing. For the most part, that’s all standard fair in any modern intranet, whether it’s from a startup provider or an established player like Jive.
Viva Insights feels like the odd one out here, especially after Microsoft’s kerfuffle around its Productivity Score. The idea here is to give managers insights into whether their team (but not individual team members) are at risk of burnout, for example, in order to encourage them to turn off notifications or set daily priorities (a good manager, I’d hope, could do this without analytics, but here we are, in 2021). It’s also meant to help company leaders “address complex challenges and respond to change by shedding light on organizational work patterns and trends.” Sure.
Because this is Microsoft in 2021, there’s also a lot of talk about employee well-being in today’s announcement. For most employees, that means fewer meetings, more focus time and turning off notifications after work. Obviously there are technical tools to help with that, but it’s really a question of company culture and management. I’m not sure you need analytics integrated with LinkedIn’s Glint for that, but you can now have those, too.
“As the world of work changes, the next horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement and well-being so organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365. “Our vision is to deliver a platform for the employee experience that helps organizations create a thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/microsoft-launches-viva-its-new-take-on-the-old-intranet/
Genetics testing and genome research company 23andMe is set to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition corp (SPAC) VG Acquisition Corp, a vehicle set up by Richard Branson and his company Virgin Group. The transaction is expected to result in 23andMe having around $984 million in cash available at close to spend on product development, hires and other growth strategies, and will value the company at around $3.5 billion, close to the total cited by an earlier report detailing the talks leading up to this deal.
23andMe, founded in 2006 and led by co-founder Anne Wojcicki, has raised a total of just under $900 million to date, including an $85 million Series F round announced last December. The company was one of the first to debut at-home genetic testing for individual consumers, providing kits that people can use to find out more about their own DNA, and what it says about their potential health issue, ancestry and more.
More recently, the company has turned its massive genomic data store into an opt-in genetic research resource that is used for discovery of future therapies and treatments. It also monetizes through aggregated, anonymized sharing of the data it collects with third-parties, for research and business purposes.
The deal will include $25 million each invested into the private investment in public equity (PIPE) transaction that accompanies the merger from Wojcicki and from Richard Bransons. It’s expected to close in the second quarter of this year, and the resulting company will be listed on the NYSE under the ticker “ME.”
The current SPAC craze has proved a path to an exit for a number of startups, and long-private companies like 23andMe that technically still fit our definition because of the lack of an exit event, but that have also seemed content to rely on private investors to supply their cash reserves for a long time.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/23andme-set-to-go-public-via-a-virgin-group-spac-merger/
