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Google tries out new ad targeting technology, PayPal adds cryptocurrency support and Substack raises additional funding. This is your Daily Crunch for March 30, 2021.

The big story: Google starts testing its cookie alternative

Google announced today that it has begun rolling out a new technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) in a developer trial. FLoC is meant to serve as an alternative to personally identifiable cookies (which are being phased out by Google and other platforms), with Google analyzing your web browsing behavior and grouping you with other people who have similar interests, for ad-targeting purposes.

The trial is starting out in a number of geographies, including the United States — but not in Europe, where there are concerns about compliance with Europe’s GDPR privacy regulations.

The tech giants

YouTube tests hiding dislike counts on videos — The company says it will run a “small experiment” with different designs that hide dislike counts, but not the “dislike” button itself.

Ballot counting for Amazon’s historic union vote starts today — Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama has become ground zero for one of the most import labor efforts in modern American history.

PayPal’s new feature allows US consumers to check out using cryptocurrency — The feature expands on PayPal’s current investments in the cryptocurrency market.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Celebrity video request site Cameo reaches unicorn status with $100M raise — Cameo has been building a good deal of steam in recent years, but it also got a major boost amidst the pandemic.

Substack confirms $65M raise, promises to ‘rapidly’ expand its financial backing of newly independent writers — Substack did not provide material new growth metrics, instead saying that it has “more than half a million people” paying for writers on its network.

NFT art marketplace SuperRare closes $9M Series A — SuperRare launched its art platform in 2018, since then it has differentiated by maintaining a closed early access platform, closely curating the art that’s sold.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The Tonal EC-1 — Remember our deep dives into the history, businesses and growth of Patreon, Niantic, Roblox, Kobalt and Unity? We’re bringing the format back with an in-depth, multi-part look at fitness startup Tonal.

Is Substack really worth $650M? — More thoughts on Substack’s finances.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

A trove of imported console games vanish from Chinese online stores — A handful of grey market videogame console vendors on Taobao stopped selling and shipping this week.

Applications for Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt 2021 are now open — TechCrunch is on the hunt for game-changing and ground-breaking startups from around the globe to feature in Startup Battlefield during TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 this fall.

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.

Apple has updated its native Maps app with more helpful information designed to assist with travel while mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Apple Maps on iPhone, iPad and Mac will now show COVID-19 health measure information for airports when searched via the app, either through a link to the airport’s own COVID-19 advisory page, or directly on the in-app location card itself.

The new information is made available through a partnership with the Airports Council International and provides details on COVID-19 safety guidelines in effect at over 300 airports worldwide. The type of information provided includes requirements around COVID-19 testing, mask usage, screening procedures and any quarantine measures in effect, and generally hopes to help make the process of traveling while the global pandemic continues easier, and as vaccination programs and other counterefforts are set to prompt a global travel recovery.

Earlier this month, Apple also added COVID-19 vaccination locations within the U.S. to Apple Maps, which can be found when searching either via text, with Siri, or using the “Find nearby” location-based feature. Last year, the company added testing sites in various locations around the world and added COVID-19 information modules to cards for other types of businesses.

Applications for Startup Battlefield are now open! Founders, this past year has been challenging in ways words can’t encompass. But you are persevering and now is the time to show the world what you have been working on. TechCrunch is on the hunt for game-changing and ground-breaking startups from around the globe to feature in Startup Battlefield during TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 this fall. Startups will be competing for a $100,000 equity-free prize, the eyes of investors from around the world and global media coverage on the most famous stage in tech media.

Eligibility & Application. Startup Battlefield highlights early-stage companies from all geographies, in any industry. Startups should have an MVP. Founders simply need to apply here. Every application is reviewed by a member of the TechCrunch editorial team. TechCrunch takes ZERO fees — the application and participation/training program for selected companies is free. TC does not take equity in any company.

Training. Startups selected to pitch will engage in intensive training over several weeks with the Startup Battlefield team. Founders will perfect their pitches, finesse their business models and hone their presentation skills. Founders will have access to master classes from experts on how to build, market and scale the startups.

Pitch. About 25 startups will be selected to pitch on the main stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. Each founder will present for six minutes, with a live demo, followed by a Q&A with our esteemed panel of judges. Judges like Kristin Green, Aileen Lee, Alfred Lin, Susan Lyne and more. After the first round, the top set of companies will pitch again in the final round in front of a fresh panel of judges. The judges will pick the winner who will receive the Disrupt cup and the $100,000 equity-free prize money.

Disrupt. Startup Battlefield founders are the VIPs of TC Disrupt. Founders get access to private events, complimentary event tickets, exhibition space on the virtual show floor, access to CrunchMatch and a private Startup Battlefield reception with members of the Startup Battlefield alumni community. Battlefield founders will also get access to future TC events and a free subscription to Extra Crunch.

Launch your startup this September. Step into the spotlight. Apply now.

This afternoon Substack, a paid-newsletter startup, confirmed that it has raised $65 million, as initially reported by Axios. TechCrunch dug into the math behind the financing here. As anticipated, a16z led the new financing.

What’s in store from the now Series B-backed company? Product work. The company wrote that intends to “rapidly” expand its Substack Pro program, which pays writers for a year to assist them in launching their own mini-publication; Substack takes a larger cut of Pro user earnings during their first year, reverting to its usual split the next.

The Substack Pro model has attracted controversy in recent days, with some writers — both on Substack and not — criticizing the startup for opacity in whom it pays via its Pro program; some have argued that Substack is subsidizing anti-trans writers in particular.

The company is motoring ahead on building out its infrastructure regardless, stating in its note that it intends to spend some of its new capital on creating “increasingly powerful subscription-publishing tools,” and “a support infrastructure for independent writers.” More tooling, and more assistance could prove key to enticing more writers from their current employers — or Substack rivals — to its platform.

The company also wrote that it plans to boost its community-building and local news efforts.

Substack did not provide material new growth metrics, instead saying that it has “more than half a million people” paying for writers on its network; that figure is unchanged from a January figure that Bloomberg reported.

As Facebook and Twitter build out their own newsletter efforts, and rival startups like Pico and Ghost offer related services, the paid-media space is a hot market today. At issue is more than the future homes for a handful of well-known writers with large audiences. The various tech companies competing in the space are each wagering that the long tail for paid writing is long, and that individuals of many profile sizes will be able to attract and hold a paid audience.

After what feels like decades in which online writing was devalued to commodity prices, it’s startling to find ourselves in a world where various well-financed companies are competing for our pens.

Arm today announced Armv9, the next generation of its chip architecture. Its predecessor, Armv8 launched a decade ago and while it has seen its fair share of changes and updates, the new architecture brings a number of major updates to the platform that warrant a shift in version numbers. Unsurprisingly, Armv9 builds on V8 and is backward compatible, but it specifically introduces new security, AI, signal processing and performance features.

Over the last five years, more than 100 billion Arm-based chips have shipped. But Arm believes that its partners will ship over 300 billion in the next decade. We will see the first ArmV9-based chips in devices later this year.

Ian Smythe, Arm’s VP of Marketing for its client business, told me that he believes this new architecture will change the way we do computing over the next decade. “We’re going to deliver more performance, we will improve the security capabilities […] and we will enhance the workload capabilities because of the shift that we see in compute that’s taking place,” he said. “The reason that we’ve taken these steps is to look at how we provide the best experience out there for handling the explosion of data and the need to process it and the need to move it and the need to protect it.”

That neatly sums up the core philosophy behind these updates. On the security side, ArmV9 will introduce Arm’s confidential compute architecture and the concept of Realms. These Realms enable developers to write applications where the data is shielded from the operating system and other apps on the device. Using Realms, a business application could shield sensitive data and code from the rest of the device, for example.

Image Credits: Arm

“What we’re doing with the Arm Confidential Compute Architecture is worrying about the fact that all of our computing is running on the computing infrastructure of operating systems and hypervisors,” Richard Grisenthwaite, the chief architect at Arm, told me. “That code is quite complex and therefore could be penetrated if things go wrong. And it’s in an incredibly trusted position, so we’re moving some of the workloads so that [they are] running on a vastly smaller piece of code. Only the Realm manager is the thing that’s actually capable of seeing your data while it’s in action. And that would be on the order of about a 10th of the size of a normal hypervisor and much smaller still than an operating system.”

As Grisenthwaite noted, it took Arm a few years to work out the details of this security architecture and ensure that it is robust enough — and during that time Spectre and Meltdown appeared, too, and set back some of Arm’s initial work because some of the solutions it was working on would’ve been vulnerable to similar attacks.

Image Credits: Arm

Unsurprisingly, another area the team focused on was enhancing the CPU’s AI capabilities. AI workloads are now ubiquitous. Arm had already done introduced its Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) a few years ago, but at the time, this was meant for high-performance computing solutions like the Arm-powered Fugaku supercomputer.

Now, Arm is introducing SVE2 to enable more AI and digital signal processing (DSP) capabilities. Those can be used for image processing workloads, as well as other IoT and smart home solutions, for example. There are, of course, dedicated AI chips on the market now, but Arm believes that the entire computing stack needs to be optimized for these workloads and that there are a lot of use cases where the CPU is the right choice for them, especially for smaller workloads.

“We regard machine learning as appearing in just about everything. It’s going to be done in GPUs, it’s going to be done in dedicated processors, neural processors, and also done in our CPUs. And it’s really important that we make all of these different components better at doing machine learning,” Grisenthwaite said.

As for raw performance, Arm believes its new architecture will allow chip manufacturers to gain more than 30% in compute power over the next two chip generations, both for mobile CPUs but also the kind of infrastructure CPUs that large cloud vendors like AWS now offer their users.

“Arm’s next-generation Armv9 architecture offers a substantial improvement in security and machine learning, the two areas that will be further emphasized in tomorrow’s mobile communications devices,” said Min Goo Kim, the executive vice president of SoC development at Samsung Electronics. “As we work together with Arm, we expect to see the new architecture usher in a wider range of innovations to the next generation of Samsung’s Exynos mobile processors.”