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User blogs
Despite efforts from companies to create equitable environments, it’s clear that employees of a certain demographics, like Black women, sometimes have very different experiences from their counterparts. Glassdoor aims to better surface those experiences through a new feature that allows folks to filter ratings by demographics.
Up until now, Glassdoor only presented an overall ranking for a specific company, so there was no way to easily determine if, for example, Black women feel the same as white men, or if Latino men feel similarly to Asian men. In addition to race, Glassdoor now allows people to filter by gender identity, parental or caregiver status, disability, sexual orientation and veteran status.
Overall, Black employees are less satisfied at work in comparison to all employees, according to new preliminary research from Glassdoor. The research is based on the more than 187,000 employees across more than 3,300 companies who have provided demographic data.
Image Credits: Glassdoor
That same research showed Apple had the highest overall company rating among Black employees, with an average rating of 4.2 out of five. Apple’s overall company rating from that sample size is 3.9.
“Because these data are so new — having been collected within just the last four months — it’s important to resist the urge to make sweeping claims based on early data,” Glassdoor Data Scientist Amanda Stansell and Chief Economist Andrew Chamberlain said in the report. “The averages we’ve reported above are not derived from representative probability samples of company workforces — they represent data shared anonymously by Glassdoor users at this time. Readers should therefore take some caution in making conclusive, company-wide inferences about the state of race and employee satisfaction.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/17/glassdoor-now-lets-you-filter-company-reviews-by-demographics/
If you’ve ever tried to hop on the bus in San Francisco and were bummed to find that Apple Pay wasn’t an option: good news! That’s changing. Apple has announced that support for Clipper (the payment system for BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit, and a bunch of other Bay Area transit agencies) is officially on the way. You’ll soon be able to just tap your iPhone or Apple Watch to the card reader and be on your way.
Apple says that Apple Pay will work across all 24 agencies where Clipper is accepted, meaning it should play friendly with:
- AC Transit
- BART
- Caltrain
- City Coach
- County Connection
- Dumbarton Express
- FAST
- Golden Gate Ferry
- Golden Gate Transit
- Marin Transit
- Muni
- Petaluma Transit
- SamTrans
- San Francisco Bay Ferry
- Santa Rosa CityBus
- SMART
- SolTrans
- Sonoma County Transit
- Tri Delta Transit
- Union City Transit
- Vine
- VTA
- WestCAT
- Wheels
Apple does mention that it’ll work with the optional “Express Transit” feature built into Wallet, allowing you to make these relatively small transit transactions without requiring Face ID or Touch ID verification — a nice touch for when there’s 10 people waiting to get on behind you and you’d rather not have to deal with convincing your phone that you are, in fact, you.
So when will it officially roll out? Good question — and one that Apple isn’t answering yet. In an e-mail announcing the coming Clipper support, they say it’s “Coming soon,” but don’t get any more specific than that. A tweet from the @BayAreaClipper account, meanwhile, narrows it down to “this spring” and reiterates that Google Pay support is coming soon, as well.
We’re going mobile! Clipper is coming to Apple Pay and Google Pay this spring. Stay tuned for more details! #clippercard
— Bay Area Clipper (@BayAreaClipper) February 17, 2021
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/17/apple-pay-will-soon-work-on-bart-and-muni/
As part of the grant-making associated with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Infrastructure for Rebuilding America program, the agency will for the first time carve out some of that program’s $889 million budget for projects addressing climate change and environmental justice.
The projects will be evaluated on whether they were planned as part of a comprehensive strategy to address climate change, or whether they support strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as deploying zero-emission-vehicle infrastructure or encouraging shifts in modes of transportation or vehicle miles traveled, the agency said in an announcement.
“As we work to recover and emerge from this devastating pandemic stronger than before, now is the time to make lasting investments in our nation’s infrastructure,” said Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a statement. “We are committed to not just rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, but building back in a way that positions American communities for success in the future—creating good paying jobs, boosting the economy, ensuring equity, and tackling our climate crisis. The INFRA grant program is a tremendous opportunity to help achieve these goals.
Racial equity will also be considered, according to the agency’s announcement. With requirements including equity-focused community outreach and projects designed to benefit underserved communities privileged, along with projects that are located in opportunity, empowerment, or promise zones or choice neighborhoods.
The new programs show just how quickly federal dollars could be made available to startups that are looking at electrification and provide more strength to the tailwinds already propelling the electric vehicle industry — and its attendant charging networks forward.
Large infrastructure projects could receive grants of $25 million or more while small projects must have grant requirements that meet a minimum threshold of at least $5 million, according to the DOT.
Eligible project costs could include: reconstruction, rehabilitation, acquisition of property (including land related to the project and improvements to the land), environmental mitigation, construction contingencies, equipment acquisition, and operational improvements directly related to system performance.
Opportunities for applications are going to be open through Friday, March 19.
Facebook plays hardball in Australia, Epic Games expands its fight against Apple and New York’s attorney general sues Amazon. This is your Daily Crunch for February 17, 2021.
The big story: Facebook cuts off news-sharing in Australia
In response to a proposed law forcing internet platforms to pay news publishers directly, Facebook announced today that Australian users will not be able to share or view news links.
In its post, Facebook drew a direct contrast with the other big company targeted by the law, with managing director for Facebook Australia and New Zealand William Easton writing, “Google Search is inextricably intertwined with news and publishers do not voluntarily provide their content. On the other hand, publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook, as it allows them to sell more subscriptions, grow their audiences and increase advertising revenue.”
The tech giants
Epic Games takes its Apple App Store fight to Europe — The Fortnite-maker has lodged a complaint with the bloc’s antitrust regulators.
NY AG sues Amazon over treatment of warehouse workers — The suit alleges that Amazon failed to provide adequate health and safety measures in two New York facilities, and that it unlawfully disciplined and fired employees who complained.
Google Maps users can now pay for parking or their transit fare right from the app — This is part of an expanded partnership with transportation software companies Passport and ParkMobile.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Locus Robotics has raised a $150M Series E — The round values the robotics company at $1 billion.
SpaceX reportedly raises $850M in new funding — This is a massive round by most standards, but not by SpaceX’s.
Jet co-founder Nate Faust is building a more sustainable e-commerce experience with Olive — Faust said it’s “crazy” that 25 years after the e-commerce industry began, it’s still relying on “single-use, one-way packaging.”
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Dear Sophie: Tips for filing for a green card for my soon-to-be spouse — The latest edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
With software markets getting bigger, will more VCs bet on competing startups? — Back in the days when inside rounds were bad, SPACs were jokes and crypto a fever dream, there was lots of noise about investors who declined to place competing bets in any particular startup market.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Jamaica’s immigration website exposed thousands of travelers’ data — Immigration documents and COVID-19 lab results were left unprotected.
Reducing the spread of misinformation on social media: What would a do-over look like? — Ideas from the team at Irrational Labs.
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/2021/02/17/daily-crunch-facebook-cuts-off-news-sharing-in-australia/
Artie, a startup looking to rethink the distribution of mobile games, announced today that it has raised $10 million in funding.
There are some big names backing the company — its latest investors include Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures, Scooter Braun’s Raised In Space, Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Susquehanna International Group, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment + The Sixers Lab, Googler Manuel Bronstein and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.
This actually represents a pivot from Artie’s original vision of creating augmented reality avatars. CEO Ryan Horrigan said that he and his co-founder/CTO Armando Kirwin ended up building distribution technology that they felt solved “a much bigger problem.”
The problem, in part, is game developers “looking for ways outside of Apple’s App Stores rules and restrictions.” (That’s certainly something Fortnite-maker Epic Games seems to be fighting for.) So Artie’s platform allows users to play mobile games without installing an app, from the browser or wherever links can be shared online.
Image Credits: Artie
Artie isn’t the only startup focused on the idea of app-less mobile gaming, but Horrigan said that while other companies are limited by JavaScript and HTML5, Artie supports Unity, meaning it can build casual (rather than hyper-casual) games, and eventually games that might even go deeper.
“Similar to cloud games, we’re running Unity games on our cloud, but rather than rendering their graphics on the cloud and pushing the video to players, we’re not running graphics on the cloud,” he said. “We’re streaming assets and animations that are highly-optimized and rendered in real-time through the embedded web browser.”
In other words, the goal is to get frictionless distribution outside of app stores, while avoiding some of the issues facing cloud gaming, namely significant infrastructure costs and lag time.
The startup is developing and releasing games of its own, with an Alice in Wonderland game, a beer pong game and more on the schedule for later this year, then a massively multiplayer online game planned for 2022. But the company also plans to release an SDK allowing other developers to distribute through its platform as well.
Horrigan said Artie’s initial games will be free-to-play, monetized through in-game purchases. They’ll use cookies to remember where players were in the game, but players will also be able to create logins.
Artie is also developing games with a major music star and a superhero IP-owner, and he argued that by combining no-code/low-code authoring tools with Artie’s distribution platform, this could become a bigger trend.
“We want to be working with the next generation of influencers to make games using these low-code or no-code solutions, then publish to their audiences directly on YouTube,” he said. “Imagine what a branded game would look like from your favorite hip hop star. We think that’s coming, and we think Artie is the platform to make that happen.”
