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We’re excited to announce Group Membership for Extra Crunch. The feature allows you to easily manage seats and payments for your team through a self-service interface. If your team joins through Group Membership, you’ll also save 25% or more on annual pricing.
Extra Crunch Group Memberships can be found here.
Extra Crunch is a members-only community from TechCrunch. We help founders and startup teams get ahead. Membership grants you access to weekly startup investor surveys, private tech market analysis, how-tos on fundraising and growth, topical newsletters, and more. Membership also unlocks access to our weekly virtual event series, Extra Crunch Live.
Extra Crunch Group Memberships can be found here. For questions on Group Membership, please contact travis@techcrunch.com.
FAQ
How does Group Membership work?
One team leader will become the admin on the account, and he or she is responsible for payment and seat management. We recommend the admin be the first user on the team to sign up for Group Membership.
How do I make seat assignments?
The seat assignments can be made in the original checkout flow or at a later date through the “My Account” section on TechCrunch. To assign seats through “My Account,” the admin should go to My Account / Subscription / Manage / Manage Shared Accounts. You’ll need email addresses of your team members to assign seats. Once seats are assigned, your team members will receive an email with an activation link.
How many users do we need to qualify for Group Membership?
You must have at least 5 team members in your group to qualify for Group Membership.
Is 25 the max size for Group Membership?
We have the ability to do groups larger than 25, but we’ll need to send you a special link. Please reach out to travis@techcrunch.com with your group size to obtain the link.
Do you offer invoicing instead of credit card?
All payments must be made over credit card. If your group is larger than 100 users, we’re open to discussing invoicing options. We do not offer invoicing for small groups. Reach out to travis@techcrunch.com for more information.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/save-25-with-extra-crunch-group-membership/
Amazon founder and current CEO Jeff Bezos will be transitioning to Executive Chair of the company sometime in Q3 of this year, with current AWS CEO Andy Jassy taking over the top executive role at the commerce company. Amazon announced the news alongside its earnings results on Tuesday.
Amazon initially rose after-hours as the market digested both the company’s earnings and its CEO news. The company beat on both earnings per share, and revenues. That makes it hard to untangle the market’s response to its busy set of announcements. Update: Amazon shares have now dipped into negative territory as investors had more time to parse the company’s total collection of announcements.
Amazon crushed earnings-per-share and revenue expectations in Q4 2020. So, any investor worried about the exit of Bezos from the CEO chair were given some measure of of performance-based amelioration. Amazon’s quarter was its first to break the $100 billion mark, bringing in $125.6 billion in revenue against an anticipated $119.7 billion. And, the company’s $14.09 per share in earnings was nearly double an expected $7.23.
Jassy has been identified previously as the likely successor to Bezos, after leading Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the success it currently enjoys as a leader in the cloud computing space. AWS grew its revenues by 28% in the quarter, lower than its year-ago growth rate of 34%. AWS’s net revenues expanded from $9.95 in the year-ago Q4 to $12.74 billion during the fourth quarter of 2020. Operating income at AWS scaled as well, from $2.60 billion in Q4 2019 to $3.56 billion in the most recent quarter.
Notably Microsoft’s Azure business grew 50% in its most recent earnings period.
Bezos sent an email to Amazon employees, which the company also released publicly on its blog on Tuesday following the announcement. In the missive, he says that while he continues to “find [his] work meaningful and fun,” he wants to be able to devote proper time and attention to his “Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and [his] other passions.”
Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, has achieved a lot to date, and regularly flies suborbital missions with its New Shepard launch vehicle. This coming year will be a busy one for the space company, since it should likely begin flying people on New Shepard for the first time.
In addition to its own human spaceflight goals, Blue Origin is currently developing a human lunar landing system for NASA, in partnership with other space industry leaders. It’s also working on another launch vehicle, New Glenn, which will be a heavy-lift class rocket capable of delivering payloads to orbit. So there’s a lot going on, there, too. Bezos has previously referred to Blue Origin as the “most important work that he’s doing” because of the scale of its potential impact on the future of humanity.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/jeff-bezos-will-no-longer-be-ceo-of-amazon-as-of-later-this-year/
SpaceX has once again flown its Starship spacecraft, a still-in-development space launch vehicle it’s building in south Florida. This test was a flight of SN9, the ninth in its current series of prototype rockets. The test involved flying SN9 to an altitude of around 10 km (just over 6 miles or nearly 33,000 feet). After reaching that apogee, the SN9 spacecraft altered its attitude to angle for re-entry (simulated, since it didn’t actually leave Earth”s atmosphere) and then descended for a controlled landing.
This is the second test along these lines, with the first happening in December using its SN8 prototype, the one before this in the current series. Today’s test saw SN9 reach its target altitude as intended, and saw a successful ‘belly flop’ maneuver, as well as the required propellant hand-off. This was also a successful test of the flaps on Starship, which control its angle as it moves through the air, and which alter their angle via on-board motors to do so. The landing portion didn’t go as smoothly – the spacecraft attempted to re-orient itself to go vertical for landing, but didn’t make it quite straight up-and-down, and also had too much speed going into the touchdown, so it exploded rather spectacularly when it hit ground.
Image Credits: SpaceX
SpaceX had a very similar test the first time around, with things going mostly smoothly up until the landing portion of the mission. During SN8’s flight, the Starship prototype appeared to be better-oriented for landing before touching down too hard, but it’s difficult to say too much about which was more or less successful without access to the data and the testing parameters.
Starship is designed to perform this crucial maneuver as part of its approach to reusability – the spacecraft is intended to be fully reusable, and will accomplish this with a powered-landing that includes, obviously, not the exploding component. As the company noted, however, the rest of this test looks pretty much like what they wanted to happen.
This kind of early testing isn’t expected to go exactly to plan, and the point is primarily to collect data that will help improve further attempts and spacecraft development. Of course, you’d hope to get things exactly right upon your first attempts, but it never actually works that way in rocketry. What is unusual is how public SpaceX is with its development program at this stage of testing.
The company will be back at it with another try soon. It already has its SN10 prototype set up on its launch site at its Texas facility, which is the other spaceship you see in the early part of the animation above.
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%.
