& meet dozens of singles today!
User blogs
Chat platforms like Slack have been game-changes when it comes to what business users want and expect out of their work communications. Today, a company that’s aiming to move the goalpost again with an integrated, open-source alternative is announcing some funding to fuel its growth.
Rocket.Chat, a startup and open source-based platform of the same name used by banks, the U.S. Navy, NGOs, and other organizations big and small to set up and run any variety of secure virtual communications services from one place — they can include not just team chat, but also customer service, collaboration platforms covering your staff and outside partners, school classrooms, conferences and more — has raised $19 million.
The company plans to use the funding both to continue adding more customers, but also expanding the platform’s functionality, including more security features, a way to use the service over federated blockchain architecuture, apps for marketplaces, options for bots, and more social media and omnichannel customer service integrations, and potentially facilities for virtual events.
As more business interactions have gone virtual, it has essentially opened the door for companies like Rocket.Chat building virtual communications platforms to build in an increasing number of features into what it does.
The Series A round of funding has four lead investors — Valor Capital Group, Greycroft, Monashees, and NEA — with e.ventures, Graphene Ventures, ONEVC, and DGF also participating. The Porto Alegre, Brazil-based startup (which is incorporated in Delaware) has now raised $27 million to date.
Rocket.Chat is not disclosing its valuation with this round, but it comes on the back of some significant growth in the last year. The startup now has 16 million registered users across 150 countries, with 8 million of them monthly active users. Of that 16 million, 11.3 million users registered for the service in the past six months. It’s currently installed on some 845,000 servers, the company said, and has over 1,500 developers building on its platform.
Rocket.Chat’s funding and expanding business comes as part of a bigger focus overall for open source platforms.
The promise of open source in the world of enterprise IT has been that it provides a platform to customise a service to fit with how the organization in question wants to use it, while at the same time providing tools to make sure it is robust enough in terms of security, extensibility and more for use in a business environment.
Over the years, it has become a big business opportunity, in line with organizations getting more sophisticated in terms of what they expect and need out of their IT services, where off-the-shelf apps may not always fit the bill.
Rocket.Chat positions itself as something of an all-in-one superstore for any and all communications needs, with organizations putting their own services together in whatever way works for their purposes.
It can either be hosted and managed by customers themselves, or used as a cloud-based SaaS, with its pricing ranging between free (for minimal, self-hosted services) through to $4 per user per month, or higher, depending on which services customers want to have, whether its hosted or not, and how much the platform is being used each month.
As you can see in the mock-up here, its basic platform looks a little like Slack. But if you are using it for omnichannel communications for customer service, for example, you can build a platform within Rocket.Chat where you incorporate communications from any other platforms that might use to communicate with customers.
Its work collaboration platform also starts with Rocket.Chat’s basic chat interface, but also allows you integrate alerts and links to other apps that you regularly use, as well a video calls and more. These and other functions built on Rocket.Chat can then be made to interact with each other — for example handing tickets off in customer service to internal tech support teams — or separately.
The idea is that by providing a version that can be hosted and managed by organizations themselves, it gives them more privacy and control over their electronic messaging.
Its thousands of customers reflect an interesting mix of the kinds of organizations that are looking for solutions that do just that.
Gabriel Engel, the CEO and founder, tells me the list includes several military and public sector organizations including the U.S. Navy, financial services companies like Credit Suisse and Citibank, as well as the likes of Cornell, Arizona State, UC Irvine, Bielefeld University and other educational institutions, and a number of other private companies.
That flexibility does not always play to Rocket.Chat’s advantage, however. Controversially, it seems that the list also includes the other end of the spectrum of organizations that want to keep their messages limited to a very specific audience: Islamic State it turns out also hosts and runs a Rocket.Chat to disseminate messages.
Engel says that while this is not something that the company supports, and that it works with authorities to shut down users like these as much as it can, it’s a consequence of how the service was built:
“We are not able to track usage if they are running Rocket.Chat servers of their own,” he said. “There’s a reason why the U.S. Navy uses Rocket.Chat. And that’s because we cannot track and know what they’re doing. It’s isolated from any external influence, for better or worse.” He added that the company has policies so that if an illicit organization is using its SaaS version, these get taken down in cooperation with authorities. “But just as with Linux, if you download and run Rocket.Chat on your own computer, then obviously we it’s out of our reach.”
Hearing about how a platform built with privacy by design can be abused, with seemingly little to be done about it, does seem to offset some of the benefits. The ethics of that predicament, and whether technology can ever solve it, or whether it will be up to government authorities to address, will continue to be a question not just for Rocket.Chat but for all of us.
In the meantime, investors are interested because of the alternative it provides to those groups that need it.
“In today’s environment, organizations must have a secure communication platform to engage teams internally, communicate with customers and partners externally, and connect with safe interest-based communities,” said Dylan Pearce, Partner at Greycroft, in a statement. “Rocket.Chat’s world-class management team and open-source community lead the industry in innovation and provide a communications platform capable of serving every person on the planet.”
There is so much data sitting inside companies these days, but getting data to the people who need it most remains a daunting challenge. Polytomic, a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort set out to solve that problem, and today the startup announced a $2.4 million seed.
Caffeinated Capital led the round with help from Bow Capital and a number of individual investors including the founders of PlanGrid, Tracy Young and Ralph Gootee, the company where Polytomic founders CEO Ghalib Suleiman and CTO Nathan Yergler both previously worked.
“We synch internal data to business systems. You can imagine your sales team living in Salesforce and would like to see who’s using your product from your customer data that lives in other internal databases. We have a no-code web app that moves internal data to the business systems of the office,” Suleiman told me.
Data lives in silos across every company, and Polytomic lets you build the connectors by dragging and dropping components in the Polytomic interface. This new data then shows up as additional fields in the target application. So you might have a usage percentage field added to Salesforce automatically if you were connecting to customer usage data.
The company actually sells the product to business operations teams, who would be charged with setting up a catalogue or menu of data sources that live in Polytomic. This is usually handled by someone like a business analyst who can configure the different sources. Once that’s done, anyone can build connectors to these data sources by selecting them from the menu and then choosing where to deliver the data.
The founders came up with the idea for the company because when they were at PlanGrid, they faced a problem getting data to the people who needed it in the company. The problem became more pronounced as the company grew and they had ever more data and more employees who needed access to it.
They left PlanGrid in 2018 and launched Polytomic a year later to begin attacking the problem. The two founders joined YC as a way to learn to refine the product, and were still working on it on Demo Day, delivering their presentation off the record because they weren’t quite done with it yet.
They released the first iteration of the product last September and report some progress getting customers and gaining revenue. Early customers include Brex, ShipBob, Sourcegraph and Vanta.
The company has no additional employees beyond the two founders as of yet, but with the seed funding in the bank, they plan to begin hiring a few people this year.
No sooner did we start developing a newsletter, the newsletter industry exploded. Twitter jumped in with a purchase of Revue, Facebook was rumored to be investigating the platform, and each new day brought further experiments. You could blame it on the post-Trump lifting of the fog of despair. The pandemic continued apace, with new variants spurring distribution of vaccines and a transparency in communications with the new president and his team.
After years of social mining of our behavior, interests and transactions, inference has been replaced by direct evidence. The politics of data pressure mandate that we expect free software bundled with increasingly powerful hardware. The core utility of a phone culture shifted as people kept to their homes and mostly used the televisions for entertainment and news, and the phones as notifications consumers. The desktop remained the creation engine for business documents, analytics and information triage.
One year after the pandemic took hold, the outlines of the recovery are becoming visible. Because so much of our transaction history is funneled through the phone, we have left less need or incentive for teasing out indirect data and making inferences on it. Netflix is a honeypot for direct recording of choices, tagged along each customer’s timeline with the minute-by-minute social characteristics of the groups they participate in.
The resulting data type is beyond the bifurcation of product in the Apple hardware sense and the user as product in the Google or Facebook sense, Netflix creates a kind of social signal out of the analytics that is recycled back into the service where it impacts on the user’s behavior organically. We tap into the recommendation flow not just at the Netflix level but also the notification and conversational flows.
Newsletters offer a similar organic resonance, as they combine the author’s analysis of the information flow (in the form of citations) with the actual orbiting references. As with Netflix, the user leaves a breadcrumb trail along with time data as they record their choices and unread items. The maturing newsletter model is one where the authorship more correctly anticipates what has been seen by the target audience, and saves time and insight for rapid return on the investment. Group metrics synthesize this benefit into value on Netflix, where the “ratings” are based on retention and time compression. This is the newsletter opportunity.
If you buy the idea of media consolidation under the newsletter umbrella, how will that manifest itself? Already we’re experiencing a battle similar to the age of blogs, where individual voices built a social engagement cloud that emulated the dynamics of a magazine. Just as Apple inserted itself into the music business with playlists and MTV with top 40 radio, blogs leveraged Twitter and social to create bundles of news, features and commentary. As with playlists, the users were in charge.
Mobile brought notifications to the party, blending blogs with media. Initially podcasts leveraged RSS’s attachment extension to download sound and video files to iPods. But when streaming arrived, the preferred way of consuming the content was by clicking on the notification. This in turn disrupted the cable networks just as the kids went mobile and abandoned TV. During the 2020 campaign, notifications were a great way of routing around insufferable analysis in favor of the actual events.
Meanwhile, Facebook Live, Periscope and YouTube gave virtually everybody a seat at the table. Podcasts democratized media, and streaming democratized distribution. I know many think podcasting is experiencing a renaissance, but personally I think streaming is inventing a new paradigm of the economics of the industry.
Take Clubhouse, for example. It’s distinguished by what it doesn’t do rather than what it does: no recording, therefore no replays. No video, only audio. No lurking, at least surreptitious checking out the scene. If you click on a Clubhouse notification, your name pops up for all to see. And there’s no button to Leave Loudly, just Quietly. Significantly, however, you can operate in a private room, and then go public if you want to. It’s podcasting with an invisibility mode.
Private rooms are just the place to hash things out. Today I had several conversations skirting these issues. One was muted, tentative, doubt mixed with an arrogant optimism. The other was supple, teeming with validation and the presence of humor to leaven the serious nature of the fleeting time we may have. Not recorded, in one case just a regular cell call. But the mulch created informs this post, with its scaffolding of intersecting items lurking in calm support. Podcasting, no.
It reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium, where the planets orbit and the asteroids bisect the swirling cosmos. We’re suspended in the teeming reaches of the near universe, with its fractal efficiency in the representation of the whole. The enterprise moves glacially forward, a breast stroke pace with a small wake. Somehow big things are afoot. At a minimum, they could be.
from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter
__________________
The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 22, 2021.
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang
Subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.
The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/gillmor-gang-in-my-room/
Instagram is developing a new feature that could give its app more of a TikTok-like feel: Vertical Instagram Stories. Today, users browse through Stories through taps and horizontal swipes — a feature Instagram adopted from Snapchat. But now, Stories are passé. Even Snapchat is borrowing ideas from TikTok. Its recent launch of Spotlight, for example, is its own TikTok clone.
In many ways, vertical swiping feels more natural than taps and horizontal flicks. It is, after all, how users navigate much of the mobile web, as well as other key features across a variety of social apps, like Facebook’s News Feed or YouTube’s home page.
That said, turning Instagram Stories into a vertical feed would be a notable change, and one that could potentially set the stage from a shift away from more static content — like the photos and reshared Feed posts that still often fill the Stories section today. In a “Vertical Stories” feed, on the other hand, Instagram would likely prioritize video posts over images to better compete with TikTok, just as it’s currently tweaking its algorithms and overall design to prioritize Reels. (A turn of the dials that has already been leveraged by indie creators to significantly grow their followings, in fact).
The “Vertical Stories” feature was spotted under development by Alessandro Paluzzi who shared the discovery on his Twitter account.
#Instagram is working on Vertical Stories
Swipe up and down to browse stories. pic.twitter.com/LDJje8l137— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) February 2, 2021
His screenshot shows a simple user interface with text that reads: “Now you can swipe up and down to browse stories” and then a big, blue button labeled “Vertical Stories.”
Paluzzi tells TechCrunch that the feature is not yet live. Instead, he dug it up from Instagram’s code.
Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch the feature is being built but is not out to the public at this time.
“This is an early prototype and is not currently testing on Instagram,” a company spokesperson told us.
A prototype may never actually make it to a public launch, of course, but its existence does say something about what sort of ideas Instagram is considering as a means of offering a better challenge to TikTok.
Today, the company’s TikTok rival, Reels, has been shoehorned into the platform via the Instagram Explore page, where Reels sits in the top position. When you click on the Reels video here, you’re taken to a new user interface where you then vertically swipe through videos, similar to TikTok.
This doesn’t feel right, and the launch of the new format has added to Instagram’s clutter. Today, the app has all sorts of places users can publish their videos, including in the Feed, as Stories, as longer-form IGTV content, and now Reels. It’s too much.
Instagram knows this arrangement isn’t quite working. As Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently told The Verge, most people probably don’t even understand the difference between IGTV content and videos posted to Instagram, for example. He said the company was looking at ways to simplify and consolidate its ideas, too.
While his comments were focused on the confusion between Instagram’s normal video posts and IGTV, there’s also significant overlap between Instagram’s Stories’ vertical video content and Reels. A “Vertical Stories” feed could allow for an eventual combination of those formats — Stories videos and Reels, perhaps.
It’s not clear that’s at all what Instagram has in mind, though. The social network could just be looking to transition another part of its app to the more modern vertical feed, as the demand for the traditional Stories format declines.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/instagram-confirms-its-working-on-a-vertical-stories-feed/
Google, together with its partner SubCom, today announced that the company’s privately owned Dunant subsea cable between Virginia Beach, Virginia and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast is now operational.
Google first announced this project, which was named after the first Noble Peach Price winner and founder of the Red Cross, Henry Dunant, back in the middle of 2018. At the time it expected the project to go live in 2020, but besides dealing with the complications of spanning a long cable between continents, the project leaders probably didn’t budget for a global pandemic at the time.
The almost 4,000-mile cable has a total capacity of 250 terabits per second — or enough to transmit the “entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second” (though maybe using Library of Congress data size references is starting to feel a bit antiquated at this point?). Unlike some older cables, Dunant uses 12 fiber pairs, coupled with a number of technical innovations around maximizing its bandwidth, to achieve these numbers.
“Google is dedicated to meeting the exploding demand for cloud services and online content that continues unabated,” said Mark Sokol, senior director of Infrastructure, Google Cloud. “With record-breaking capacity and transmission speeds, Dunant will help users access content wherever they may be and supplement one of the busiest routes on the internet to support the growth of Google Cloud. Dunant is a remarkable achievement that would not have been possible without the dedication of both SubCom and Google’s employees, partners, and suppliers, who overcame multiple challenges this year to make this system a reality.”
Image Credits: Google
With Dunant now being operational, the next Google cable to go live will be the Grace Hopper cable between New York and Europe, with landing sites in Bilbao, Spain and Bude, UK. Google first announced this new cable, which it is also building in partnership with SubCom, last July. It’s expected to go online in 2022 and will feature a total of 16 fiber pairs.
In addition, Google is also building the Equiano cable from South Africa to Portugal. This cable is supposed to go online later this year.
In addition to its privately-owned cables, Google is also a partner in a number of consortiums that band together to build cable systems.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/googles-new-subsea-cable-between-the-u-s-and-europe-is-now-online/
