Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Daily Crunch: OnePlus announces its first smartwatch

OnePlus unveils new hardware, Apple updates its educational offerings and Facebook reveals plans for its next developer conference. This is your Daily Crunch for March 23, 2021.

The big story: OnePlus announces its first smartwatch

The Chinese smartphone maker announced the OnePlus Watch today, a $159 smartwatch with a minimalist design and a new operating system. It also comes with a number of different sensors to measure things like heart rate and blood oxygen level.

In addition, the company also announced its OnePlus 9 series of phones, its first phone built in partnership with legendary camera company Hasselblad, with a primary camera that includes a 48-megapixel Sony sensor. Pricing starts at $729, with pricing for the Pro starting at $969.

The tech giants

Apple launches the Apple Teacher Portfolio recognition, updates Schoolwork and Classroom apps — Teachers who complete a total of nine lessons will be able to submit their portfolio of lesson examples to earn the Apple Teacher Portfolio designation.

Facebook will bring back F8 on June 2 as a pared-back, single-day, virtual-only conference for developers — There will be no Mark Zuckerberg keynote this year.

New York’s Department of Financial Services says Apple Card program didn’t violate fair lending laws — This follows an investigation triggered by online complaints back in November 2019.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Robinhood files confidentially to go public — The company may be closer to a public debut than we anticipated.

‘Instant needs’ delivery startup goPuff raises $1.15B at an $8.9B valuation — Last fall, delivery startup goPuff made a big splash by raising $380 million in funding and acquiring West Coast beverage retailer BevMo shortly afterwards.

Roll still doesn’t know how its hot wallet was hacked — Move fast, break things, get hacked.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Discord’s reported $10B exit; Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications set IPO price ranges — Discord is a well-financed unicorn that has raised significant capital and reportedly sports rapidly expanding revenues.

Pre-seed round funding is under scrutiny: Is VC pandemic posturing here to stay? — New data from the DocSend Startup Index show that for early-stage fundraising, particularly in the pre-seed round, founders need to approach VCs with much more than a great idea to secure funding.

Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features — Most startups would kill for hockey-stick growth, but it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight.”

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

Everything else

Top tech CEOs will testify about social media’s role in the Capitol attack this week — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai will all appear virtually before a joint House committee Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.

‘Black Widow’ and ‘Cruella’ will get Premier Access releases on Disney+ — That means Disney+ subscribers will have the option to pay an additional, one-time $29.99 fee to watch the live action remake of “Cruella” at home on May 28, or to do the same for “Black Widow” on July 9.

Extra Crunch Live’s April slate features speakers from Forerunner, Accel, Fifth Wall and more — April showers bring May flowers, and by “flowers” I mean actionable insights and advice from some of the top minds in tech.

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.



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OnePlus 9 arrives, sporting a Hasselblad-branded camera system

Cameras have long been the battleground on which the smartphone wars have been fought. Short of any left-field innovation like folding screens or strange form factors, that looks likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. Year after year and generation after generation, companies tout imaging breakthroughs to set themselves apart.

It makes sense. Smartphones have improved to a point where flagship devices are, as a rule, pretty good. And while cameras have been a part of those improvements, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, both in terms of hardware and the software/AI that augments it. Recently, OnePlus announced that it would be recruiting a big name to help it in that fight.

Earlier this month, the Chinese smartphone maker unveiled a three-year deal with Hasselblad, one of the most iconic names in the photography space. Announced at an event today, the company’s new OnePlus 9 series will be the first handset to sport the early fruits of the $150 million deal.

The deal makes sense from a strategic standpoint. After all, OnePlus’s transformation from a high-end budget device to flagship competitor has put companies like Apple and Samsung in its sights. Both of those companies have established and long-standing imaging departments for their hardware, so in addition to a clear branding partnership, this does seem to be an earnest attempt to level the playing field.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

It’s worth noting, up top, that the days of being the budget alternative are, to a degree, gone. The OnePlus 9 starts at $729 and the Pro starts at $969. As smartphone pricing goes, that’s toward the lower-end of premium devices, but after the introduction of the Nord, it seems safe to say that budget will no longer be a primary differentiator for OnePlus’s primary line.

Naturally, the OnePlus 9 Pro gets the most benefit from these early stages of the Hasselblad deal. The primary camera sports a 48-megapixel Sony sensor, coupled with improved focus speeds and increased color accuracy. The ultrawide camera has a 50-megapixel sensor (also Sony), with a lens designed to reduce distortion. Interestingly, the company says it’s also effective for shooting close macro shots with distances as close as 4cm.

The third primary camera is an eight-megapixel telephoto capable of up to 30x digital zoom (though you’re going to lose a fair bit of information). There’s a fourth monochrome camera, as well, which primarily serves to help improve black and white shots. The standard OnePlus 9 has a similar setup, though you’ll drop that telephoto lens.

Here’s OnePlus on what Hasselblad is bringing to the table this time out:

The new Hasselblad Pro Mode offers incredibly accurate and natural color for a solid foundation for post-editing. It has been revamped with a new user interface based on Hasselblad’s image processing software to give professional-level users a unique Hasselblad look and feel. It also allows for an unprecedented amount of control for expert photographers to fine-tune their photos, with the ability to adjust ISO, focus, exposure time, white balance and more. Users can also shoot in 12- bit RAW format for 64-times the color compared with 10-bit RAW traditionally found in other smartphones.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Keep in mind, the partnership is still in its early stages, and much of the money is going toward R&D, so we’ll probably be seeing more integration down the road.

The display is the same as the one found in the OnePlus 8T. That’s a 6.55-inch AMOLED with a 120Hz refresh rate. Brightness maxes out at 1,100 nits, and the screen sports HDR10+ certification. There’s a Snapdragon 888 inside, coupled with 8 or 12GB of RAM and 128 or 256GB of storage. Both models feature a solid 4,500 mAh battery that goes from empty to 100% charge in 29 minutes.

Pre-orders start March 26. The handsets will ship April 2.



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Thursday, March 18, 2021

Daily Crunch: YouTube’s TikTok rival launches in the US

YouTube Shorts comes to the U.S., Amazon starts testing electric delivery vans in San Francisco and new data suggests the impact of Google Play’s recent changes. This is your Daily Crunch for March 18, 2021.

The big story: YouTube’s TikTok rival launches in the US

The YouTube Shorts product allows users to record, edit and share videos of 60 seconds or less, which can be accompanied by licensed music from a variety of industry partners. The company has been testing the feature in India while making Shorts viewable internationally — but until today, U.S. viewers couldn’t actually create short videos of their own.

Sarah Perez took an in-depth look at the Shorts experience, noting that it’s pretty similar to TikTok while lacking some key features, such as intelligent sound syncing.

The tech giants

Amazon begins testing its Rivian electric delivery vans in San Francisco — This makes SF the second of 16 total cities that Amazon expects to bring its Rivian-sourced EVs to in 2021.

Data shows how few Google Play developers will pay the higher 30% commission after policy change — As regular Daily Crunch readers will remember, Google recently announced that it’s cutting the commissions it charges developers on Google Play.

Twitter begins testing a way to watch YouTube videos from the home timeline on iOS — Shortly after Twitter announced it would begin testing a better way to display images on its app, it’s now doing the same for YouTube videos.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Substack faces backlash over the writers it supports with big advances — The startup has lured some of its most high-profile (and controversial) writers with sizable payments.

Homebrew backs Higo’s effort to become the ‘Venmo for B2B payments’ in LatAm — Rodolfo Corcuera, Juan José Fernández and Daniel Tamayo founded the company in January 2020, recognizing that the process of paying vendors for business owners is largely “manual and cumbersome.”

NFT marketplace OpenSea raises $23M from a16z — OpenSea has been one of a handful of NFT marketplaces to explode in popularity in recent weeks.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service — Amid declining ridership, transportation agencies find new software partners.

Three steps to ease the transition to a no-code company — Despite the many benefits, adopting a no-code platform won’t suddenly turn you into a no-code company.

Snowflake gave up its dual-class shares. Should you? — The mechanism can enable founders to maintain control despite later dilution and may sometimes even grant ironclad control in perpetuity.

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

Everything else

Tech companies should oppose the new wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation — TechNet’s David Edmondson puts the spotlight on a number of states that are currently considering anti-LGBT legislation.

Talking robots with Ford — We interview Ford’s Technical Expert Mario Santillo about its new robotics initiatives.

Startups, get your bug bounty crash course at Early Stage 2021 — Katie Moussouris, founder and chief executive at Luta Security, will give a crash course in bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure programs at TC Early Stage 2021.

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.



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Kuda raises $25M more led by Valar to become the neobank for ‘every African on the planet’

Challenger banks continue to make significant advances in attracting customers away from the big incumbents by providing more modern, user-friendly tools to manage their money. Today, one of the trailblazers in this area, Kuda Technologies, is announcing funding to continue building out its specific ambition: to provide a modern banking service for Africans and the African diaspora, or as co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi describes them, “every African on the planet, wherever you are in the world.”

The company, which currently offers mobile-first banking services in Nigeria, has picked up $25 million in a Series A being led by Valar Ventures, the firm co-founded and backed by Peter Thiel, with Target Global and other unnamed investors participating. This is the first time that Valar — which has invested in a number of fintech startups, including N26, TransferWise, Stash, and just in the last week BlockFi and BitPanda — has backed an African startup.

Kuda currently provides services for consumers to save and spend money, and it has recently introduced overdrafts (essentially revolving credit for individuals). Ogundeyi said in an interview that the plan is to use these new funds to continue expanding its credit offerings, to build out services for businesses, to add in more integrations, and to move into more markets.

The funding is coming on the heels of very strong growth for Kuda, which is co-headquartered in London and Lagos.

When we last wrote about the startup, four months ago, it had just closed a seed round of $10 million led by Target Global. That was, at the time — and I think still is — the largest-ever seed round raised by a startup out of Africa, and thus as much of a milestone for the tech industry there as it was for Kuda itself.

At the time of the seed round, Kuda had registered 300,000 customers: now, that figure has more than doubled to 650,000, and tellingly, that base is spending more money through the Kuda app.

“In November we were doing about $500 million in transactions per month,” Ogundeyi said, for services like bill payments, card transactions, and phone top-ups. “We closed February at $2.2 billion.”

Kuda Transaction Screen CardKuda, as we described in our profile of the company when covering its seed round, is following in the footsteps of a number of other so-called “neobanks”, building a suite of banking services with a more accessible user interface and a more modern approach: you interact with the bank using a mobile app, and in addition to basic banking services, it provides tools to help people manage their money more intelligently.

But Kuda is also different from many of these, specifically because it taps into some financial practices that are unique to its market.

As Ogundeyi describes it, most people who are employed by companies will have “salary accounts” at banks, where companies pay in a person’s wages on a regular basis. These will typically be at incumbent banks, but they do not offer the same ranges of services to customers. No mobile apps, no facilities to buy mobile top-ups or make other kinds of bill payments, no AI-based calculators to figure out your monthly spend and provide suggestions on how to manage your budget, and so on.

That has opened a gap in the market for others to provide those services in their place. Kuda’s deposits, Ogundeyi said, typically start as basic transfers that people make from those “salary accounts” elsewhere. These start out small, maybe 20% of a person’s wages, but as those users find themselves using Kuda’s payment and other tools more, they are increasing how much they transfer in each payment period.

“As the trust increases you’re naturally more comfortable having money with Kuda,” he said. The next stage from that will be people depositing money directly with Kuda. A small minority already do this, he added, although the startup “has a bit more work to do” to get more companies integrated into its platform. (This is one of the areas that will be developed with this latest round of funding.)

In turn, having more money in Kuda accounts is likely to spur another wave of services being turned on at the startup, such as loans with more competitive interest rates, because they will not just be based on how much money people have but also their spending histories on the platform. “We can offer loans to salaried customers instantly as long as their salary is with Kuda,” he said.

Much of this is being enabled because of how Kuda is built. A lot of challenger banks have tapped into a world of finance and banking APIs built by another wave of fintech startups, partnering with other banks to provide backend deposit and other services: their value-add is in building efficient customer service and tools to help people manage and borrow money in smarter ways.

Kuda, on the other hand, has its own microfinance banking license from the central bank of Nigeria. This means that on top of building those same money management services, Kuda can also issue debit cards (in partnership with Visa and Mastercard), manage payments and transfers, and build all of the services in the stack itself, including those salary account services and loans. (Kuda does have partnerships with incumbent banks, specifically Zenith Bank, Guaranteed Trust and Access Bank, for people to come in for physical deposits and withdrawals when needed.)

While the service is still only live in Nigeria, the “vision is still to serve all Africans in Africa as well as outside of it,” Ogundeyi said.

The first step of that will likely be Nigerians outside of Nigeria — most likely in the UK, where Kuda already has a headquarters, and where it has a ready market: London alone has been estimated to be home to upwards of 1 million Nigerian immigrants and people of Nigerian descent (the number of UK residents actually born in Nigeria is considerably smaller, more like 200,000: that is the diaspora at work).

He added that the startup is also at work on preparing for the next countries on the continent to expand its service, another area where this funding will go: “It will let us fast track teams, on-the-ground operational teams,” he said.

The bigger picture is that the market for financial services targeting Africans has been on a significant upswing and so we will be seeing a lot more activity coming out of the region, not just from home-grown startups, but also out of other tech companies increasingly doing more business in that part of the world.

Cases in point: in addition to Stripe acquiring Nigerian payments company Paystack last year, just earlier this week, PayPal announced a deal with Flutterwave to bring PayPal services to more merchants in the region — specifically so that PayPal customers can pay merchants in the region using PayPal rails. Square’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, meanwhile never did make his intended move to the continent — Covid-19 has derailed many plans, as we all know — but it shows that the company trying not to overlook opportunities there, either.

PayPal, to be clear, has been active in Nigeria since 2014 but partnering with a significant player in the region represents an important step for it: Flutterwave itself earlier this month raised $170 million and became Africa’s latest unicorn, in what is still a pretty small list.

The fact that there is so much more to be done with payments and more financial services leaves the door open wide for Kuda to move in a number of different directions if it chooses. Having customers in two countries, especially with one foot in the developed market and another in an emerging market, for example, gives the company an interesting window into the world of remittances.

Money transfer has been one of the very biggest, and most important financial services for African diasporas — alongside those from many other emerging markets.

Even in cases where people are “unbanked” and have no other financial footprints, they have been turning to remittance services to send money home to their families from abroad. Kuda, with its integrations into people’s salaries, could easily become an efficient, one-stop-shop conduit for that activity too. (That’s one reason, likely, that remittance startup, Remitly, has also moved into starting to offer accounts to its users in originating countries.)

All of this to say that Valar’s making a new kind of bet here, but one laden with possibilities and a differentiated approach compared to the rest of its investment activities.

“Nigeria is at a tipping point in the adoption of digital banking,” noted Andrew McCormack, a general partner and co-founder at Valar, who led its investment here. “With the rapidly growing, youthful population who are open to new financial alternatives, Kuda is well-positioned to benefit and will transform the landscape of African banking. We are excited to lead their Series A and continue on the journey alongside Kuda.”



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Fleksy co-founder is suing Apple over lost revenue resulting from App Store scammers

Kosta Eleftheriou, a co-founder of the Fleksy keyboard app later sold to Pinterest in an acqui-hire deal, has been calling attention to Apple App Store issues like fake reviews, ratings and subscription scams, as well as malicious clone apps, after his own app, FlickType, was targeted by scammers. Now, the developer is taking the next step in his App Store crusade: he’s filing a lawsuit against Apple.

The suit, which the developer claims was filed Wednesday in California Superior Court in Santa Clara county, alleges that Apple enticed developers to build applications for its App Store — the only place iOS applications can be legally sold — by claiming it’s a safe and trustworthy place, but doesn’t protect legitimate app developers against scammers profiting from their hard work.

What’s more, the suit says, Apple is disincentivized to do so because scammers are generating revenue for Apple via their use of subscriptions, which involve a revenue share with Apple.

Eleftheriou has been personally impacted by App Store scammers. He left a well-paying job at Pinterest to develop his FlickType app, an alternative swipe keyboard for Apple Watch. After its launch, the app targeted by copycat app makers who claim their apps offer the same feature set as FlickType does, but instead lock users into high priced subscriptions for their poorly designed software. They also flood their apps with fake ratings and reviews to make them appear to be a much better option when users are looking for an app in this space.

Meanwhile, FlickType sports a 3.5-star rating, as it’s often dinged for Apple Watch platform issues that are outside the developer’s control or missing features users want to call attention to. Eleftheriou engages with his app’s users, however — responding to complaints and letting users know when features they’ve requested were added or bugs have been fixed. Scammers simply buy enough 5-star reviews to keep their apps’ overall ratings higher.

In other words, Eleftheriou is doing the hard work of being an App Store developer carving out a category for swipe keyboards for the Watch, but his potential income is being shifted over to scam apps who have a falsified App Store presence.

In years past, Apple took issues of app quality seriously. It worked to clean up shady subscription apps and remove clones and spam from the App Store through regular sweeps. It even once went so far as to ban apps built using templates in an effort to raise the bar on app quality, which angered small businesses who didn’t have the resources or funds to build more professional apps. (Apple later revised its policy to be more equitable.)

But the new lawsuit alleges that Apple is now doing little to police scammers’ apps because it profits from developer misconduct. Eleftheriou also notes he has raised these issues to Apple via his company KPAW, LLC, but Apple did “next to nothing” to resolve the problem.

Eleftheriou’s story is even more complicated, though, because his app was rejected from the App Store numerous times after meeting with Apple special projects manager Randy Marsden over a possible acquisition. He tells TechCrunch numbers were discussed with Apple and his meetings had included a Director and a VP, among others. Apple was considering turning FlickType into an Apple Watch feature, the lawsuit notes.

Shortly thereafter, FlickType was pulled from the App Store over App Store Review Guidelines violations, even as a competitor’s app was approved. Eleftheriou appealed for his app through Developer Relations but was given no guidance on how to prevent the same problem in the future, he said.

Over the months that followed, FlickType continued to face rejections from App Store Review. Apple’s App Store Review said that the app offered a “poor user experience,” even though tech journalists at numerous outlets had praised it, and Apple had once considering buying it. App Review also told the developer that “full keyboard apps are not appropriate for Apple Watch,” while it continued to allow competitors to publish their own keyboard apps.

Apple’s App Review team also allowed third-party apps that were running FlickType’s integratable version of the keyboard to be approved without issues. These included Watch apps like Nano for Reddit, Chirp for Twitter, WatchChat for WhatsApp, and Lens for Instagram.

After Apple approved FlickType in January 2020, the company claims it had already lost over a year of revenue to competitor keyboards that were not constantly being rejected. Nevertheless, FlickType reached the App Store’s Top 10 Paid app list and generated $130,000 in its first month. As a result of its success, it was quickly targeted by scammers who launched watered down, barely usable competitors to the app, cutting into FlickType’s revenue. FlickType’s revenue dropped to just $20,000 per month. The competitors were also using fake ratings to get their app boosted and installed by unsuspecting users.

Eleftheriou’s story was not unique, as it turned out. In recent months, he has been documenting the App Store’s multimillion-dollar scams, including those he was facing as well as others brought to his attention by developers with similar struggles. Apple, in some cases, would take action against the scammers he highlighted on social media. In other cases, it would not. And it would sometimes only take down one of the developer’s scam apps, but allow others under the same developer account to continue to operate.

The new lawsuit aims to hold Apple accountable for the issues Eleftheriou faced by asking Apple to restore his lost revenue and pay out any other damages awarded by the court.

Apple has not responded for a request for comment at this time.

A copy of the lawsuit is below. It is not yet appearing in public record searches for verification purposes. We’ll follow up to confirm when the case appears online and update accordingly.

Kpaw, LLC v. Apple, Inc by TechCrunch on Scribd



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Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Daily Crunch: Google Play halves commission on developers’ first $1M

Google is letting developers keep more of their Play revenue, Instagram adds teen safety features and we examine the global distribution of venture funding. This is your Daily Crunch for March 16, 2021.

The big story: Google Play halves commission on first $1M

Following a similar move by Apple last year, Google said that it will be reducing its fee from 30% to 15% for the first $1 million that developers earn through Google Play annually.

This is slightly different from Apple’s approach, in that it applies to all developers — although the fee goes back to 30% for any money earned beyond that first million dollars.

“We’ve heard from our partners making $2 million, $5 million and even $10 million a year that their services are still on a path to self-sustaining orbit,” wrote Google’s Sameer Samat. “This is why we are making this reduced fee on the first $1 million of total revenue earned each year available to every Play developer that uses the Play billing system, regardless of size.”

The tech giants

Instagram adds new teen safety tools as competition with TikTok heats up — Instagram says it’s rolling out new safety features that will restrict adult users from being able to contact teens who didn’t already follow them.

Google’s Soli radar returns to track sleep on the new Nest Hub — We haven’t heard a peep from Project Soli since the technology was introduced with the Pixel in late-2019.

China wants to dismantle Alibaba’s media empire: reports — Over the years, Jack Ma has accumulated a media portfolio in China that rivals that of Jeff Bezos in the United States.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Socure raises $100M at $1.3B valuation, proving identity verification is hotter than ever — Socure uses AI and machine learning to verify identities.

Overwolf raises $52.5M for its platform to build, distribute and monetize in-game, user-generated content — The company’s platform has some 30,000 creators, 90,000 mods and add-ons, and 18 million monthly users across thousands of games.

Aiming to become the definitive source for location data, SafeGraph raises $45M — While there are plenty of companies selling data about physical locations, SafeGraph CEO Auren Hoffman said his startup is “one of the few companies to sell this data to data science teams.”

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The global inequity in venture financing is staggering — There’s been a boom in Latin American and European fintechs, as well as a general rise in VC activity in a host of Asian countries, but the landscape remains imbalanced.

The NFT market is just getting started, but where is it headed? — Part one in a three-part series.

Farmland could be the next big asset class modernized by marketplace startups — Startups like AcreTrader and others including Tillable, FarmTogether and Harvest Returns are bringing marketplace models to the farming world.

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

Everything else

Ford expands robotics research into $75 million University of Michigan facility — Ford Motor Company will be embedding 100 of its researchers and engineers in a new robotics and mobility facility on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus.

Talking product-market fit with Sean Lane, whose company tore through 28 products to become a unicorn — Occasionally, it’s easy for startups to achieve so-called product-market fit, but more often, it’s a struggle.

Get feedback on your pitch deck from tech leaders on Extra Crunch Live — The importance of the pitch deck can’t be underestimated.

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.



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Google’s Family Link updates reflect the pandemic’s impact on how parents view screen time

Google is making changes to its parental control system, Family Link, that aims to better reflect parents’ changing views on children’s screen time. In the pre-pandemic world, parents were more likely to see screen time as something in need of restriction — they’d rather their kids get offline or go outside to play with friends, perhaps. But the challenges of a locked-down world and the push towards virtual learning have impacted parents’ views. Google says today’s parents are more concerned about how kids are spending time on their devices, not how much time is being spent.

It’s a concession to a world where devices have become a savior of sorts to families who’ve stayed at home to avoid Covid — where they’ve been restricted from seeing extended family and friends, and where schools are closed and playdates and parties were cancelled. Parents came to realize that screen time in and of itself isn’t necessarily something to be avoided; they just wanted more control over how it’s used.

With the Family Link update, parents can now choose to make remote learning apps “always allowed,” so they don’t count toward overall screen time daily limits. This could include not only those apps that are used to attend school or communicate with teachers, but others that have popped up to help kids learn and be entertained, like the supplemental resources the school suggests — or the apps parents allow during break times from virtual class.

Parents will also now have access to more detailed daily, weekly and monthly activity reports that provide both an overview of how the child is spending their time in apps, as well as how screen time usage has changed over a week or month, and what portion of time was spent in the “always allowed” apps. This gives parents a better idea of what screen time was used for education versus play.

On Android, Family Link users will also be able to browse through a selection of teacher-recommended apps from the Google Play catalog for kids under 13 in the U.S. And parents can also now set screen time limits directly from the child’s device on Android.

Image Credits: Google

Though these updates will remain useful in a post-pandemic world where parents hold a more nuanced view of screen time, it’s unfortunate that Google waited until so late in the pandemic to roll these changes out. As more people in the U.S. are being vaccinated, restrictions are lifting — including the re-opening of schools in many places. That means parents’ stress over kids’ increased screen time usage will soon become a moot point. The devices will be replaced with in-person learning, and screen time may become villainized yet again.

Related to today’s news, Google has launched a new website for families whose kids are beginning to use technology at families.google. The company also launched a new content series with meditation app Headspace that will help families with kids practice mindfulness together. Again, that’s a resource that was desperately needed in 2020 during the pandemic’s heights, more so than it is today as the world begins reopening.

Still, the pandemic has forced families to think more about screen time and what sort of on-device experiences they want their children to have. As a result of this increased scrutiny, social apps like TikTok and Instagramthe latter just today, in fact — have rolled out more family-friendly safety features, aimed at encouraging parents to see their apps in a better light, rather than being the first to go when screen time gets locked down. It has also encouraged new hybrid learning and education startups to launch, hoping to build out a new category of edutainment apps that can avoid screen time lockdowns.

It’s worth noting, too, that the update to Family Link follows the addition of an App Store privacy label on iOS, which confirms the data Google collects on users. The app, until recently, had been one of the many Google iOS apps that had seen updates stalled due to the lack of labeling.



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Monday, March 15, 2021

Swell launches its app for asynchronous voice conversations

You might think that Clubhouse is the final word on audio-centric social networks, but a San Francisco startup called Swell is launching its own iOS and Android app focused on voice conversations.

The big difference: While conversations on Clubhouse all happen in real time — meaning that you’ve got to listen live or miss it all (at least for now) — Swell is focused on asynchronous comments. In other words, users post a standalone audio clip that can be up to five minutes in length (with an accompanying image and links), then other users can browse, listen and leave their own audio responses in their own time.

Swell supports audio-only group chats and private conversations, as well as public “Swellcasts” — think of a bite-sized podcast, or a Clubhouse-style conversation that’s structured more like a comment thread than a free-for-all. Users can also promote their public posts through their own pages on the Swellcast website.

Swell is led by husband-and-wife team Sudha Varadarajan and Arish Ali, who previously founded e-commerce company Skava and sold it to Infosys.

Varadarajan (the startup’s CEO) described the app as an attempt to “democratize” audio content creation, with no special equipment or serious production required, and allowing users to talk about anything. (In one example, the Swellcaster was outside talking about their front lawn.)

At the same time, she suggested that the app was created less as a response to Clubhouse and more as a general antidote to social media, where the pair saw increasing polarization and fewer genuine conversations.

Audio is hardly immune to ranting and anger — just look at talk radio. But Varadarajan suggested that making the posts asynchronous doesn’t just make it easier for listeners to catch up; it also improves the quality of the conversation: “People really think about what they’re going to say.”

She added that the company is determined to avoid any ad-based business models and instead make money by charging for premium tools and Swellcasts.

Until now, Swell has only been open to a small group of users. Today it’s launching more broadly, in advance of its session tomorrow at the virtual SXSW, “Voice is transforming our online presence. Why?



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Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Rent the Runway’s first iOS team launches Runway, an easier way to coordinate app releases

A team of mobile app engineers and designers from companies like Rent the Runway, ClassPass, Kickstarter and others, are now launching their own startup, Runway, to address the common pain points they experienced around the mobile app release cycle. With Runway, teams can connect their existing tools to keep track of the progress of an app’s release, automate many of the manual steps along the way, and better facilitate communication among all those involved.

“Mobile app releases are exercises in herding cats, we often say. There’s a lot of moving pieces and a lot of fragmentation across tools,” explains Runway co-founder Gabriel Savit, who met his fellow co-founders — Isabel Barrera, David Filion, and Matt Varghese — when they all worked together as the first mobile app team at Rent the Runway.

“The result is a lot of overhead in terms of time spent and wasted, a lot of back and forth on Slack to make sure things are ready to ship,” he says.

Typically, interdisciplinary teams involving engineers, product, marketing, design, QA, and more, will keep each other updated on the app’s progress using things like spreadsheets and other shared documents, in addition to Slack.

Meanwhile, the actual work taking place to prepare for the release is being managed with a variety of separate tools, like GitHub, JIRA, Trello, Bitrise, CircleCI, and others.

Runway is designed to work as an integration layer across all the team’s tools. Using a simple OAuth authentication flow, the team connects whichever tools they use with Runway, then configure a few settings that allow Runway to understand their unique workflow — like what their branching strategy is, how they create release branches, how they tag releases, and so on.

In other words, teams train Runway to understand how they operate — they don’t have to change their own processes or behavior to accommodate Runway.

Once set up, Runway reads the information from the various integration points, interprets it and takes action. Everyone on the team is able to log into Runway via its web interface and see exactly where they are in the release cycle and what still needs to be done.

“We’re forming this glue, this connective tissue between all of the moving pieces and the tools, and creating a true source of truth that everybody can refer to and sync or gather around. That really facilitates and improves the level of collaboration and getting people on the same page,” Savit says.

Image Credits: Runway

As the work continues, Runway helps to identify problems, like missing JIRA tags, for example. It then automatically backfills those tags. It can also help prevent other mistakes, like when the incorrect build is being selected for submission.

Another automation involves Slack communication. Because Runway understands who’s responsible for what, it can direct Slack notifications and updates to specific members of the team. This reduces the noise in the Slack channel and ensures that everyone knows what they’re meant to be working on.

Currently, Runway is focused on all the parts of the mobile app release cycle from kickoff to submission to the actual app store releases. On its near-term roadmap, it plans to expand its integrations to include connections to things like bug reporting and beta testing platforms. Longer-term, the company wants to expand its workflow include launching apps on other platforms, like desktop.

Image Credits: Runway

The startup is currently in pilot testing with a few early customers, including ClassPass, Kickstarter, and Capsule, and a few others. These customers, though not yet paying clients, have already used the system in production for over 40 app release cycles.

The startup’s pricing will begin at $400 per app per month, which allows for unlimited release managers and unlimited apps, access to all integrations, and iOS and Android support, among other things. Custom pricing will be offered to those who want higher levels of customer support and consulting services.

The startup doesn’t have an exact ETA to when it will launch publicly as it’s working to onboard each customer and work closely with them to address their specific integration needs for now. Today, Runway supports integrations with the App Store, Google Play, GitHub, JIRA, Slack, Circle, fastlane, GitLab, Bitrise, Linear, Jenkins, and others, but may add more integrations as customers require.

Runway’s team of four is mostly New York-based, and is currently participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 virtual program. The company hasn’t yet raised a seed round.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/10/rent-the-runways-first-ios-team-launches-runway-an-easier-way-to-coordinate-app-releases/
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Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Songclip raises $11M to bring more licensed music to social media

The team behind Songclip thinks that social media could use more music.

Yes, music is a big part of the experience on a handful of apps like TikTok and Triller, but Songclip co-founder and COO John vanSuchtelen told me, “That is not the end of how music is going to be a feature, that is a beginning.”

He added, “In the next nine to 12 months … just like you never have a phone without a camera, you’re not going to have an app without music clips as a feature when you make videos.”

That’s what vanSuchtelen and his co-founder and CEO Andy Blacker are hoping to enable with Songclip, which announced today that it has raised $11 million in new funding.

The startup has created an API that, when integrated with other apps (current integrations include photo- and video-editing app PicsArt) allows users to search for and share music. VanSuchtelen said that like Giphy, Songclip plans to popularize a new media format — the short audio clip — and make it accessible across a wide range of services.

“If I were to say, ‘I’m going to send you a four-minute song,’ it’s just not going to work that way, that’s not how we communicate anymore,” vanSuchtelen said. “How do you take the music and turn it into the bite that you want to use in a social context?”

To do this, Blacker said Songclip doesn’t just license music, it also does its own tagging and clipping, while offering tools for music labels to protect their intellectual property and providing data on how people are interacting with the music. And unlike Giphy, Songclip isn’t looking to build a consumer brand.

All of this involves a combination of human editors and technology. Blacker said the human element is key to understanding the nuances of songs and their association, like the fact that Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” isn’t really about bridges or water, or that Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” is a happy song even though it doesn’t have the word “happy” in it.

Songclip has now raised a total of $23 million. The new round was led by Gregg Smith of Evolution VC Partners. The Kraft Group, Michael Rubin, Raised in Space, Gaingels and ​Forefront Venture Partners​ also participated, as did industry executives Jason Flom and Steve Greenberg and the band AJR.



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Detail wants to turn your phone into a software-optimized camera app for live video

Meet Detail, a new startup working on an app for iOS and macOS so that you can turn your iPhone into a software-optimized camera for live video. The startup wants to make it easy to use the phone that you have in your pocket with the livestreaming platform that you already use, such as Zoom, Google Meet, Twitch, Hopin or YouTube Live.

Over the past year, if you have had to present something to a large audience over a livestream, chances are you’ve faced a few challenges. First, as Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal demonstrated, laptop webcams suck. There’s no way you’re going to look good with your computer.

Second, if you’re willing to invest some money, you can buy a ring light, a dedicated camera, a good microphone, etc. The issue is that it’s expensive. More importantly, it’s been really hard to buy some of this stuff as many remote workers have been looking for those devices.

Third, you might be good at teaching something, but not good at video production. Those are different skills and somehow people are telling you that you should know everything about white balance, anti-flickering and more.

As for Detail, the company wants to make it as easy as possible to go from zero to livestream. The best camera that you have is most likely the one in your pocket, right there on the back of your smartphone. For the past few years, computational photography has led to tremendous improvements when it comes to taking photos with your phone. But there’s still some work to do on the livestreaming front.

Detail founder Paul Veugen rightly points out that hosting a live video has become a commodity. But everything that happens before you send the video feed over the internet could be improved.

At first Detail is going to be an iPhone and Mac app that works hand in hand like Camo and EpocCam. There are going to be some easy-to-use settings to tweak color grades, add filters, etc. It’s going to be a more opinionated take on the smartphone-as-a-webcam movement.

Behind the scenes, the team is composed of some of the people that worked on Human, an app I started covering way back in 2013. Human was a passive fitness tracking app — you could set it up and get insights about how active you had been over the past few days. Essentially, it was like Apple’s activity rings before Apple introduced the Apple Watch. Human was acquired by Mapbox in 2016.

Detail raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Connect Ventures. Hustle Fund, Alexander Ljung, Anke Huiskes, Arthur Kosten, Elodie and Tony Jamous, Hiten Shah, Janis Krums, Mart Kelder, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, Othman Laraki, Omri Amir and Sten Tamkivi are also participating in the round.

As you can see, Detail is still in active development and the beta test is going to start soon. But it’s an intriguing app and I’m going to keep an eye on it to see how it pans out.

Image Credits: Detail



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Monday, March 8, 2021

OnePlus recruits Hasselblad for three-year smartphone imaging deal

Imaging has long been the primary battlefield on which the smartphone battles are waged. It makes sense. The thing about smartphones in 2021 is that they’re mostly very good. Sure, there are differentiators, but if you spend a decent amount on a device from any major manufacturer, you’re probably going to get a pretty good device.

But there’s still plenty of opportunity to continually bridge the gap between smartphone imaging and devoted camera systems. And today OnePlus takes a potentially key step in that direction by announcing a partnership with Hasselblad. The DJI-owned Swedish camera maker has signed onto a three-year partnership with OnePlus.

According to a release tied to the news, the pair plan to spend $150 million over the course of the deal, in an attempt to vault OnePlus to the front of the pack. Hasselblad has dipped its toes in the mobile market, including a Moto Z attachment, and has created cameras for DJI drones, but this represents a pretty big move for the 180-year-old camera company.

The first fruits of the partnership will arrive on the OnePlus 9, a new handset set to launch on March 23. The companies promise a “revamped camera system.” The phone will feature a Sony IMX789 sensor, coupled with HDR video and the ability capture 4K at 120FPS and 8K at 30FPS.

Per the release:

The partnership will continuously develop over the next three years, starting with software improvements including color tuning and sensor calibration, and extending to more dimensions in the future. The two parties will jointly define the technology standards of the mobile camera experience and develop innovative imaging technologies, continuing to improve the Hasselblad Camera for Mobile. Both companies are committed to delivering immediate benefit for OnePlus users, while continuously collaborating to further improve the user experience and quality for the long-term.

The deal includes the development of four global labs, including U.S. and Japan locations and:

Pioneering new areas of smartphone imaging technology for future OnePlus camera systems, such as a panoramic camera with a 140-degree field of view, T-lens technology for lightning-fast focus in the front-facing camera, and a freeform lens – to be first introduced on the OnePlus 9 Series – that practically eliminates edge distortion in ultrawide photos.

It will be interesting to see how a company like Hasselblad will take to mobile imaging, though such a deal could be a secret weapon as OnePlus looks to keep on the flagship end of the mobile spectrum against the likes of Apple and Samsung.



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Thursday, March 4, 2021

TikTok launches ‘TikTok Q&A,’ a new feature for creators to engage with viewers’ questions

Earlier this year, TikTok was spotted testing a new Q&A feature that would allow creators to more directly respond to their audience’s questions using either text or video. Today, the company has announced the feature is now available to all users globally. With the release of TikTok Q&A, as the feature is officially called, creators will be able to designate their comments as Q&A questions, respond to questions with either text comments or video replies, and add a Q&A profile link to their bios, among other things. The feature also works with live videos.

TikTok Q&A grew out of a way that creators were already using the video platform to interact with viewers. Often, after posting a video, viewers would have follow-up questions about the content. Creators would then either respond to those questions in the comments section or, if the response was more involved, they might post a second video instead.

The Q&A feature essentially formalizes this process by making it easier for creators — particularly those with a lot of fans — to identify and answer the most interesting questions.

Image Credits: TikTok

To use Q&A, viewers will first designate their comment as a Q&A question using a new commenting option. To do so, they’ll tap the Q&A icon to the right side of the text entry field in comments. This will also label their comment with the icon and text that says “Asked by” followed by the username of the person asking the question. This makes it easier for creators to see when scanning through a long list of comments on their video.

The feature will also feed the question into the creator’s new Q&A page where all questions and answers are aggregated. Users can browse this page to see all the earlier questions and answers that have already been posted or add a new question of their own.

Creators will respond to a Q&A question with either text or video replies, just as they did before — so there isn’t much new to learn here, in terms of process.

They can also add Q&A comments as stickers in their responses where the new video will link back to the original, where the question was first asked, similar to how they’re using comment stickers today.

The feature will also be available in TikTok LIVE, making it easier for creators to see the incoming questions in the stream’s chat from a separate panel.

Image Credits: TikTok

As a part of this launch, a Q&A profile link can be added to creators’ Profile bios, which directs users to the Q&A page where everything is organized.

During tests, the feature was only made available to creators with public accounts that had more than 10,000 followers and who opted in. Today, TikTok says its available to all users with Creator Accounts.

To enable the feature on your own profile, you’ll go to the privacy page under Settings, then select “Creator,” tap “Q&A” and then “Turn on Q&A.” (If users don’t already have a Creator account, they can enable it for themselves under settings.)

The feature is rolling out to users worldwide in the latest version of the TikTok app now, the company says.

@tiktokYou can now ask and answer any questions on LIVE with the new Q&A feature. Check it out now!

♬ original sound – TikTok



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