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Facebook spent more time than usual talking about their success with VR in their quarterly earnings call, taking time to note developer success and their own wins peddling their latest Quest 2 VR headset.
One of the VR platform’s remaining quirks is a general lack of third-party support for apps that go beyond gaming. The headset is a powerful piece of hardware with few VR ports of mobile apps available, even available streaming apps from Hulu and Netflix have seen scant updates due to the relatively small number of headsets out there.
Facebook, a major app maker itself, has seemed to be playing a fairly delicate balancing act in bringing some of the mothership’s utility to the headset without alienating consumers who might be less interested in a clearly Facebook-branded piece of hardware. After mandating Facebook-login last fall it seems like most bets should be off there. Today, the company announced that Quest and Quest 2 users will now gain access to Messenger chats inside the app, enabling users to fire off a quick canned message to friends, use the in-VR keyboard to pound out a quick message, or use the headset’s voice-to-text feature.
For those upset about Facebook’s increasingly heavy-handed software presence on their VR platform, this will likely be another reason to avoid the Quest 2, but for those eager to make their VR gameplay a more social experience or avoid the total isolation that comes from strapping a headset on and ignoring your phone, it will be much more welcome.
Alongside, the Messenger update, Facebook also shared that with the new update, they will be rolling out what they call App Lab, essentially a TestFlight-like feature to allow Quest users to download content outside of the curated Oculus Store. It’s a feature meant to address develop complaints that Facebook has boxed fledgling game designers out from bringing content to the Quest. Users can search for the title by name in App Lab or click a link to be directed to the title. The new feature competed directly with SideQuest, a startup that has been building a hub for more experimental Quest content.
Facebook says that the new update is rolling out “gradually” to users so not all users may see the update immediately.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/facebook-messenger-lands-on-oculus-quest/
For SaaS companies, not having a gig economy strategy as we start 2021 is like missing the internet trend in 1990 or failing to get ahead of the mobile revolution in 2010.
Leading SaaS are now using on-demand experts to revolutionize the customer experience. They’re growing revenue and post-sales retention and even using the insights to build better products. According to Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA), the global gig economy is approaching $5 trillion as project-based staffing continues this digital transformation.
SaaS superstars like Amazon AWS and Qualtrics have been investing in on-demand expertise for years, and in 2019, market research firm Million Insights published a market report that predicted tech services will be a trillion dollar market by 2025. Much of this growth boils down to some simple facts about the increasingly emotional act of consumption.
A 2013 Gallup report found that customers who had a strong attachment to a brand spend a full 23% more than an average customer of the same brand.
By bringing human experts into their software solutions, companies can engage with their customers to solve problems more efficiently and in a more personalized manner.
Conversely, more than eight in 10 executives interviewed in a 2015 report from The Economist Intelligence Unit believed their companies lose sales each year because of a failure to engage properly with the customer.
By bringing human experts into their software solutions, companies can engage with their customers to solve problems more efficiently and in a more personalized manner while simultaneously gathering important insights about how to make their products more intuitive.
It’s a win-win for both sides, but it involves putting aside the notion that new product features will solve your customers’ every need. They won’t. In fact, more than 80% of new product features are never used.
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Software companies race to release new products and features because they want to provide the very best technologies to their customers and edge out the competition. Yet no matter how well-intended their decisions, too many SaaS features fail to drive real customer engagement. Why? Because no matter how advanced the software is, it can only do so much.
And when it comes to understanding and solving the customer’s problem, too often the new features simply aren’t enough.
There are four core drivers for why on-demand experts are a critical requirement for any business:
Need for increased customer retention
In today’s time-starved world, most of your customers are not able to learn and understand the full capabilities of your offering on their own. In fact, most of your customers are using less than 20%, and possibly as little as 5% of your feature set. Their underutilization directly impacts the retention and growth of your service, because customers don’t value capabilities they don’t use or even know about. From a financial perspective, the ROI of retention cannot be overstated. The Harvard Business Review reported that a mere 5% increase in retention can increase profits between 25% and 95%.
Landed, a startup aiming to improve the hiring process for hourly employers and job applicants, is officially launching its mobile app today. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding.
Founder and CEO Vivian Wang said that the app works by asking applicants to fill out a profile with information like work experience and shift availability, as well as recording videos that answer basic common interview questions. It then uses artificial intelligence to analyze those responses across 50 traits such as communication skills and body language, then matches them up with job listings from employers.
Landed has been in beta testing since March of last year — yes, right as the COVID-19 was hitting the United States. Wang acknowledged that this was bad news for some of the startup’s potential customers, but she said businesses like grocery stores and fast food restaurants needed the product more than ever.
“That’s why we continuously grew through 2020,” she said.
After all, Landed allowed those businesses to continue hiring without having to conduct large group interviews in-person. And even beyond health concerns, she said managers struggle with rapid turnover in these positions (something Wang saw herself during her time on the corporate team at Gap, Inc.) and with a hiring process that’s usually “only a small part of their job.” So Landed saves time and automates a large part of the product.
Landed CEO Vivian Wang
Meanwhile, Wang said job applicants benefit because they can find jobs more easily and quickly, often within a week of creating a profile. She also argued that Landed can improve on existing diversity and inclusion efforts by allowing managers to see a broader pool of candidates, and because its AI matching isn’t subject to the same unconscious biases that employers might have.
Of course, bias can also be inadvertently built into AI, but when I raised this issue, Wang pointed to Landed’s partnerships with local nonprofits to bring in underrepresented candidates, and she added, “AI can be scary when there are no human checks in place. We partner directly with our employers to ensure the matches that we’re sending them are the right matches, and there are calibration periods.”
Landed is free for job applicants, while it charges a monthly fee to employers, with customers already including Wendy’s, Chick-fil-A and Grocery Outlet franchisees. In fact, Grocery Outlet Ventura owner Eric Sawyer said that by using the app, he’s gone from hiring one person for every 10 interviews to hiring one person for every three interviews.
“My time spent on scheduling and performing interviews has been cut in half by utilizing the Landed app for most of my communications,” he said in a statement.
The new funding was led by Javelin Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Palm Drive Capital and various angel investors. Wang said this will allow Landed to continue expanding — the service is currently available in seven metro areas (Northern California, Southern California, Virginia Beach/Chesapeake VA, Phoenix/Scottsdale AZ, Atlanta GA, Reno NV and Dallas-Ft. Worth TX), with a goal of tripling that number by the end of the year.
Wang added that eventually, she wants to provide other services to job applicants, such as loans (at a lower rate than payday lenders) and job training, turning Landed into a “lifestyle stability platform” that combines job stability, financial stability and educational “upskilling” for blue collar workers.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/landed-seed-funding/
Nearly a year ago, the spread of COVID-19 ended the daily commute for millions of Americans, an abrupt change that sent the ridesharing industry into a free fall.
Hip, which connected commuters with third-party bus and shuttle operators via an app, was just one of the many mobility-as-a-service startups that watched its clientele and revenue dwindle. Instead of cutting costs and waiting out the pandemic and the disruption it delivered, Hip expanded.
Hip added a business-to-business offering to its platform, a move aimed at companies and manufacturers preparing to bring back workers.
“Instead of holding back we actually doubled down and increased our platform,” CEO Amiad Solomon said in a recent interview, adding that the decision was prompted by discussions they had with large corporations that were struggling with how to safely bring employees back to the office.
The bet has paid off, Solomon said. The company, which employs 20 people at offices in New York City and Tel Aviv, has not only landed new customers, it has also raised $12 million. The funding round was led by NFX and Magenta Venture Partners, with participation by AltaIR Capital and former Uber, Booking.com and Google executives. The funding will be to hire more workers and expand its engineering, sales and operations.
Hip works with companies, in any location, to determine their needs. The company developed an internal tool that companies can use to upload thousands employees and their home addresses. That information is then used to help companies determine their needs and control costs.
On the most basic level, the Hip platform connects companies to the bus and shuttle providers. It offers route planning and has a contact-tracing tool to help companies track COVID-19 infections. Companies can also use the platform to set vehicle capacity controls and add customized features within the app, such as health and consent forms. Employees can use the app to book tickets, reserve seats and track their transportation in real time.
Employee shuttles are not new. The difference, Solomon said, is the flexibility that this platform provides.
“It’s not the same route, it’s not the same people and it’s not the same frequency,” Solomon said. We built out the entire infrastructure, both in terms of technology, but also in terms of our distribution. We now support over 200 cities with our partners in the U.S.”
Hip locked in its first corporation in late October and now has a handful of active customers. There are dozens more companies that are ready to use the platform once they decide to bring workers back, Solomon said.
“Now that we’re working on the corporate side, we see how much opportunity there is,” Solomon said. “I think that we’ll move more and more into this direction of providing modern software systems and the connection between that software and the transportation providers — to be that glue that connects corporations and their ground transportation needs to the world of our vetted partners and providers.”
Cloud hosting company Scaleway is adding a new type of instances today — Mac minis powered by Apple’s M1 chip. The new instances cost €0.10 per hour, around $0.12 at today’s rate — there’s a minimum commitment of 24 hours.
Scaleway is hosting those new computers in its DC4 data center in Paris — it’s a former underground nuclear fallout shelter. Right now, the Mac minis aren’t available in the company’s other data centers in Amsterdam or Warsaw.
When you boot up a Mac mini from the console, you get an entry-level Mac mini with 8GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD and macOS Big Sur. And of course, it uses Apple’s first Arm-based chip, the M1.
After that, you can connect to the instance using VNC — you’ll see the desktop environment and you’ll be able to use it like a normal Mac. You can also connect to the instance using SSH directly in case you only need a command line interface.
Scaleway isn’t the first company to offer Mac mini instances. Amazon Web Services recently launched its own Mac mini instances, but they rely on Intel i7 CPUs and costs $1.083 per hour — or $26 for 24 hours. The company will likely roll out M1 minis at some point in the future.
There are also several Mac-focused hosting companies out there, such as MacStadium, MacinCloud, MacWeb and Mac Mini Vault. An M1-powered Mac mini with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage currently costs $109 or €109 per month on MacStadium — that’s slightly more expensive than Scaleway. If you keep a Mac Mini instance for 30 days on Scaleway, it costs €72 (or $87 at today’s rate).
You can use Mac servers for development purposes, and specifically for continuous integration and delivery. Building an iOS app requires a Mac. You can’t just build the app on an Ubuntu server. So if you want to build your app on a server, you have to rent a Mac.
But you may have different use cases for a Mac server. You might want to use it to test your macOS app on Apple silicon before releasing it. Or you might just want to play around with the M1.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/scaleway-launches-mac-mini-cloud-instances/
