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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a  record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently released “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis. This week, we’ll look at the coronavirus outbreak’s impact on the App Store, China’s demand for App Store removals — and soon-to-be-removals, it seems. We’re also talking about Facebook’s lawsuit over a data-grabbing SDK, Tinder’s new video

A consultancy that makes business training videos is advertising for a "deepfake expert". from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3acMuBv

A new startup called Notivize aims to give product teams direct access to one of their most important tools for increasing user engagement — notifications. The company has been testing the product with select customers since last year and says it has already sent hundreds of thousands of notifications. And this week, it announced that it has raised $500,000 in seed funding led by Heroic Ventures. Notivize co-founder Matt Bornski has worked at a number of startups including AppLovin and Wink, and he said he has “so many stories I can tell you about the time it takes to change a notification that’s deeply embedded in your stack.” To be clear, Bornski isn’t talking about a simple marketing message that’s part of a scheduled campaign. Instead, he said that the “most valuable” notifications (e.g., the ones that users actually respond to) are usually driven by activity in an app. For example, it might sound obvious to send an SMS message to a customer once the product they’ve purchased

There are plenty of accelerators aiming to sway young startups to join their ranks rather than apply to Y Combinator, but Pioneer ‘s sell is a bit different. First off, they are fully remote; founders selected to participate in the program chat with advisors via video chat. Second, Pioneer is largely looking at companies that aren’t companies yet, framing themselves as more of a “startup generator” than an accelerator that aims to help entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley zero in on exactly what kind of startup they want to build. Earlier this month, I wrote about the accelerator, which is helmed by former YC partner Daniel Gross . Ex-YC partner Daniel Gross rethinks the accelerator My interview with Gross had some interesting longer bouts I didn’t have space to include, so I’m including the salient bits here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. TechCrunch: Remote work seems to have its challenges; how have you overcome some of the humps of being a remot

By BY JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2TscmTp

End Game Interactive CEO Yang C. Liu has a refreshingly straightforward description of what he and his co-founder Luke Zbihlyj are up to: “We’re just building games. And to be honest, we don’t know what we’re doing.” Despite this self-proclaimed ignorance, End Game has just raised $3 million in seed funding from an impressive group of investors: The round was led by the game-focused firm Makers Fund, with participation from Clash of Clans developer Supercell, Unity CEO David Helgason, Twitch COO Kevin Lin, Twitch VP Hubert Thieblot, Danny Epstien and Alexandre Cohen of Main Street Advisors and music executive Scooter Braun. Liu told me that he and Zbihlyj got their start by building websites tied to existing games, such as PokéVision , a site for finding Pokémon in Pokémon GO. However, they were inspired by the success of simple, browser-based multiplayer games like Slither.io to create games of their own — first Zombs.io , then Spinz.io , then Zombs Royale . Altogether, End Gam

The Church signed up to the future of AI - an ethical one - along with Microsoft and IBM. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/32xNWfp

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. All around, this has been a tough week. The coronavirus is spreading and worry is running high as infections mount. In economic terms, global markets were repeated declines last night ( domestic results here ), and the U.S. indices are off again this morning. There’s been plenty of bad news to read, even in our private market, startup-focused world. Yesterday the impact of COVID-19 on earnings became more apparent , bringing what has, for months, been an external concern to domestic technology companies. The problems are now . The past week’s market collapse into correction territory hasn’t helped,. But the story so far has largely been  public- market focused and with good reason: You can see the public markets contract in real-time. It’s far harder to see into the shifting dynamics of the private market. Today, however, we are going to try, all the same, by diggi

It wasn’t a fad. Yolo became the country’s No. 1 app just a week after launch by letting teens ask for anonymous replies to questions they posted on Snapchat. But nine months later, Yolo is still in the top 100 iOS apps and has 10 million active users. Now it’s safeguarding the app from predators while revealing a smart new feature for spinning up anonymous group chats, powered by $8 million in fresh funding. “What we are trying to build is a new kind of network where there’s a fluidity to identity,” Yolo co-founder Greg Henrion tells me. “We weren’t sure if Yolo was here to stay, but we’re still ranking well and there seems to be a real opportunity in anonymity starting with Snapchat Q&A.” Yolo is the first big win for Snapchat’s Snap Kit platform that lets developers piggyback on its login, Bitmoji avatars, stickers and Stories. This lets tiny development teams build apps that hundreds of millions of people, teens in particular, can instantly sign up for in just a few taps

By BY MIKE ISAAC from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2Pxk1OV

Hello and welcome back to  Equity , TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. What a week. What an insane, heart-stopping, odd, and stuffed week. I’m utterly exhausted. But, in better news, all of that great fodder for podcast and chat, so today’s Equity is pretty ok if I may say so. Danny and I chewed through all the stuff that we couldn’t get out of our heads, like the markets falling apart and DoorDash’s initial movement towards going public. But in keeping with the real beating heart of Equity, we also went over four venture rounds and spent some time talking about SoftBank. We were also a little tired, so come laugh with us and avoid taking things seriously for a few minutes. Here’s the week’s rundown. And, yes, I did figure out my mic in the end: The markets have lost faith in themselves , with indices falling sharply. DoorDash is going public ! We talked through the company’s known numbers and results . Roblox ra

The retail giant is removing fake cures and tackling unreasonable price hikes amid public concern. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2VvmzkH

Plague Inc. puts users in control of a disease which they must develop into a global pandemic. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2VrjvG9

BBC Click’s Soila Apparicio looks at some of the best technology news stories of the week. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3clwsYf

Reality shows in China have found creative ways to keep going while people are urged to stay home. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/32CIUhM

A 9-year-old is smashing the shuttle far and wide, and frantically pacing back and forth on the court in Bangalore, India, as her competition refuses to back down. Her rival is not a human. She is playing against a machine that is mimicking the game of badminton legend P.V. Sindhu, toned down a few notches to adjust for the age difference. By the court, her father, Jayanth Kolla, is watching the game and taking notes. Kolla is a familiar name in the tech startup and business ecosystem in India. For the last eight years, he has been helming the research firm Convergence Catalyst , which covers mobility, telecom, AI and IoT. When his daughter showed interest in badminton, Kolla rushed to explore options, only to realize that the centuries old sports could use some deep tech. He reached out to a few friends to explore if they could build a device. “I have always wondered how a younger version of players who have made it to the professional arena must have played like,” he said in an i

The West Midlands gigabit switch-on is the largest in the UK, says Virgin Media, but comes at a price. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3anhCyD

Oil drilling and construction is creating a din for sealife - new tech is hoping to turn the volume down. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/389xJy2

By BY JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2VxpCZt

Like baseball, cricket relies on grass, dirt, wood, cork, spit, spin, drop and rise en route to either victory or loss. And like baseball — and just about any other sport, really — cricket coaching staffs and their players worldwide are looking for more ways to track every move. Tracking statistics is nothing new. With each action, a player produces a stat that can be used to track improvement or struggle over a given period of time. But as players get stronger and stakes — financial and otherwise — get higher, a need for more specific data is proving necessary. India-based SeeHow transforms sports equipment into sensors to do just that, and it does so without having to alter anything on the athlete’s body. Its sensors are baked into cricket balls and bat handles to track very specific types of data that batsmen and bowlers generate. And tracking the behavior of a bowled ball and where and how it lands on a bat all play a role in the story of cricket. “Putting the sensor inside th

Every day, there’s another event-related cancellation owing to concern around coronavirus. Just today Microsoft announced it will not have a presence at the Game Developers Conference in mid-March “out of an abundance of caution.” Facebook also said today that it is canceling its annual F8 conference scheduled for May over coronavirus-outbreak concerns. The last is a particularly big deal. F8 is by far the largest event that Facebook hosts every year, so it’s little wonder that it plans to host part of the event online. Likely, Facebook will use its own tech toward this end. But there is a new option for other companies that are right now second-guessing their event plans, and that’s Run The World , a year-old, 18-person company that’s based in Mountain View, Calif., and has small teams both in China and Taiwan. What it’s doing: smooshing together every functionality that a conference organizer might need in a time of a pandemic. Think video conferencing, ticketing, interactivity

Stem , a startup that helps independent musicians get paid, is expanding with a new financing program called Scale . Co-founder and CEO Milana Rabkin Lewis described the company’s core offering as a way for collaborators to “memorialize the split” of the proceeds from a song — once they’ve uploaded a track, Scale can automatically handle splitting the payments among those collaborators. It also offers a broader suite of tools, including revenue data, to help musicians manage the financial side of their careers. However, Rabkin Lewis noticed that some musicians on Stem were starting to “graduate” by signing a deal with a record label, usually because they needed capital: “Sometimes that was money for marketing, sometimes it was money for production, sometimes it was the cost of going on tour.” With Scale, Rabkin Lewis and her team are trying to offer something better — a way for musicians to get access to the money they need without having to sign a restrictive contract. The payment

“We want to change the way freight moves,” says Oren Zaslansky, the chief executive and founder of Flock Freight . His company, which has been operating in stealth mode for the last two years, has finally emerged with a new solution for freight shipping that purports to bring in more money to shippers, remove inefficiencies in the current hub-and-spoke model for freight, and offer better deals to shipping customers. He’s also got $50 million in financing in the bank in what is one of the largest recent investments in a San Diego-based company. For Zaslansky, the shipping business isa family affair. “My parents grew up in the moving business… I grew up around both entrepreneurship and freight,” he says. Those twin passions led him to start his own trucking business out of college in the San Diego area. He also launched a brokerage business to support supply chain logistics. The exposure to both is what led Zaslansky to launch Flock Freight and its big new financing round, which clo

A quick hit as we have a podcast to record , but a few public companies in the broader SaaS market reported earnings in the past week. Their results are worth unpacking as they paint a good picture of what the markets are hunting for in modern software companies. Of course, we’re covering the firms’ share-price movements in the context of an epic selloff stemming from global conditions that are already impacting earnings . But, hey, not all the news out there is bad. In fact, for our three companies, public investors are waving green flags. So let’s take a peek regarding why Dropbox , Box  and Sprout Social — one recent IPO and two slightly-out-of-favor SaaS shops — each shot higher after reporting their Q4-era results. Earnings, results Let’s proceed in alphabetical order, putting Box at the top of our list. We’ll then work through Dropbox and Sprout Social. Box’s calendar Q4-era earnings report (the company’s Fiscal 2020 Q4) beat investor expectations three times. It report

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Earlier today, during an eye-popping market selloff , DoorDash announced that it has privately filed to go public . The decision to file privately will allow the high-valued startup to get its S-1 documents in good order with the SEC before showing the rest of us what it has up its sleeve. The move to announce  its private filing is more interesting and could be related to prepping demand for its shares, providing some PR-cover for backer SoftBank, which could use the assist, or, perhaps, to dampen investor excitement for rival companies, in the face of DoorDash’s implied success and maturity. Whatever the reasons behind the timing — some of which must deal with the capital requirements of long-running cash burn — the filing is a new milestone for the on-demand and gig economies. And how well DoorDash’s filing is received, predicated in no small part on its recent financial performance, will help set sentiment for a number of other, richly backed startups. So let’s remind ourselve

Early Stage SF goes down on April 28 and we are more excited than ever to introduce this brand new event to the community. The day-long event is meant to give early stage founders the chance to pick their own adventure, hearing from a wide variety of experts in fundraising, marketing and operations in a more intimate, Q&A-centered environment. Unlike our other events, which usually center around a single, large stage, Early Stage will feature speakers in breakout rooms fit for ~100 people, who will give their own tactical advice and then answer audience questions. We’re thrilled to announce that James Currier, Sarah Nahm, Arun Mathew and Vlad Magdalin will be joining us at the event. James Currier A serial entrepreneur, James Currier has led four VC-backed companies (Tickle, acquired by Monster; WonderHill, acquired by Kabam; Iron Pearl, acquired by PayPal; and Jiff (acquired by Castlight). He’s an early pioneer of some of the most-used tactics in the tech startup world, i

DoorDash prepares to go public, Roblox raises $150 million and Reddit’s CEO takes aim at TikTok. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 27, 2020. 1. DoorDash, the $13B on-demand food delivery startup, says it has confidentially filed for an IPO The company said that its Form S-1 (a draft registration statement) was filed with the SEC and is now being reviewed. It did not say how many shares it would potentially sell, nor the price range for the IPO, nor what the timing of its next steps would be. The timing of the news underscores just how cash-intensive the on-demand food delivery business can be. DoorDash closed its latest round, for $700 million at a $13 billion valuation, in November of last year. 2. Roblox raises $150M Series G, led by Andreessen Horowitz, now valued at $4B The funding comes at a period of significant growth for the gaming platform. Just last summer, it was being visited by 100 million users, topping Minecraft, and its developer community of over 2 million a

Applied XLabs is a new startup building tools that can automate data-gathering for journalists — and eventually, for knowledge workers in other industries. The company is emerging from Brooklyn-based Newlab , with The Boston Globe as its launch partner. It will be led by Francesco Marconi (pictured above), who was previously R&D chief at The Wall Street Journal and head of AI strategy at the Associated Press. Marconi told me that there’s a tremendous amount of data out there that could be useful to journalists, whether that’s inside public company filings or academic climate change research. But data-driven journalism remains a sliver of the industry, because “only a handful of organizations have the internal resources to create these types of tools, these types of analyses.” The plan is for Applied XLabs to develop products to help newsrooms, starting with The Globe, automatically pull data and generate insights. Vinay Mehra, president of The Boston Globe, said the hope is

Coding and other computer science expertise remain some of the more important skills that a person can have in the working world today, but in the last few years, we have also seen a big rise in a new generation of tools providing an alternative way of reaping the fruits of technology: “no-code” software, which lets anyone — technical or non-technical — build apps, games, AI-based chatbots, and other products that used to be the exclusive terrain of engineers and computer scientists. Today, one of the newer startups in the category — London-based  Gyana , which lets non-technical people run data science analytics on any structured dataset — is announcing a round of £3 million to fuel its next stage of growth. Led by UK firm Fuel Ventures, other investors in this round include Biz Stone of Twitter, Green Shores Capital and U+I , and it brings the total raised by the startup to $6.8 million since being founded in 2015. Gyana (Sanskrit for “knowledge”) was co-founded by Joyeeta Das an