Auto Added by WPeMatico
The cloud infrastructure market hit $129B in 2020
The cloud infrastructure market in 2020 reflected society itself, with the richest companies getting richer and the ones at the bottom of the market getting poorer. It grew to $129 billion for the year, according to data from Synergy Research Group. That’s up from around $97 billion in 2019.
Synergy also reported that the cloud infra market reached $37 billion in the fourth quarter, up from $33 billion in the third quarter, and 35% from a year ago.
I’ve heard from every founder under the sun for the last nine months that the pandemic was accelerating digital transformation, and that a big part of that was an expedited shift to the cloud. These numbers would seem to bear that out.
As usual the big three were Amazon, Microsoft and Google, with Alibaba now firmly entrenched in fourth place and IBM falling back to fifth. But Microsoft grew more quickly than rival Amazon, reaching 20% market share at the end of 2020 for the first time. Keep in mind that the Redmond-based software giant has now doubled its share since 2017. That’s remarkably rapid rapid growth. Meanwhile Google and Alibaba took home 9% and 6%, respectively.
Here’s what that all looks like in chart form:
Image Credits: Synergy Research
Amazon is an interesting case in that it has plateaued at around 33% for four straight years of Synergy data, but because it’s one-third share of an increasingly growing market, that means that it has kept growing its public cloud revenues as the category itself has expanded.
Amazon closed out the year with $12.74 billion in Q4 AWS revenue, putting it on a run rate of just over $50 billion for the first time. That was up from $11.6 billion the prior quarter. While Microsoft’s numbers are always difficult to parse from its earning’s reports, doing the math of 20% of $37 billion, it came in with $7.4 billion up from $5.9 billion last quarter.
Google brought in $3.3 billion, up from $2.98 billion in Q3 2020, and Alibaba pulled in $2.22 billion, up from $1.65 billion over the same time frame.
John Dinsdale, principal analyst at Synergy, says the leaders are pretty firmly entrenched at this point with huge absolute market numbers and also huge gaps between the cloud providers. “AWS has been a great success story for over 10 years now and it remains in an extremely strong market position despite increasing competition from a broad swathe of strong IT industry companies. That is a great testament both to Amazon and to the AWS leadership team and you’d have to suspect that will not change with the new regime,” he told me.
He sees Microsoft as a worthy rival, but one that is bound to hit a growth wall at some point. “It is certainly feasible that Microsoft will continue to narrow the gap between itself and Amazon, but the bigger Microsoft Azure becomes the tougher it is to maintain really high growth rates. That is just the law of large numbers.”
Meanwhile, market share at the bottom of the cloud infrastructure space continued to decline even while the number of dollars at stake have continued to expand dramatically. “The market share losers have been the large group of smaller cloud providers, who collectively have lost 13 percentage points of market share over the last 16 quarters,” Synergy wrote in a statement.
Dinsdale says all is not lost for these players, however. “Regarding the smaller players (or the big companies that have only a small market share), they can either focus on specific market niches (can be based around geography, service type or customer vertical) or they can try to offer a broad range of cloud services to a broad range of customers. Companies doing the former can do quite well, while companies doing the latter will find it extremely tough,” Dinsdale told me.
It’s worth noting that Canalys has slightly different numbers with a total market of around $142 billion and almost $40 billion for the quarter, but the percentages are in line with Synergy’s:
Image Credits: Canalys
At some point the numbers get so big they almost cease to have meaning, but as large as the public cloud revenue numbers become, they remain a relatively small percentage of overall worldwide IT spend. According to Gartner estimates, worldwide IT spend in 2020 was $3.6 trillion (with a T). That means that the cloud infrastructure market accounted for just 3.85% of total spend in 2020.
Think about that for a moment: less than 4% of IT spend currently is on cloud infrastructure, leaving so much room for growth and for those billions to grow ever bigger in the coming years.
It would certainly make it more interesting if someone could come in and disrupt the leaders, but for now at least they are going to be hard to push out of the way unless something unforeseen and dramatic happens to the way we think about computing.
Powered by WPeMatico
Daily Crunch: Google shutters internal game studios
Google rethinks its gaming strategy, Microsoft rolls out its quantum computing platform and UiPath is now valued at $35 billion. This is your Daily Crunch for February 1, 2021.
The big story: Google shutters internal game studios
When Google announced its Stadia cloud platform, it also said it was forming Stadia Games and Entertainment, an internal studio that would create titles for the platform. Now it seems the company is abandoning this approach.
It’s a surprising move, not just because Google has yet to release a single game from the studio, but also because the company opened studios in Montreal and Los Angeles, as well as acquiring Typhoon Studios — so it seems like a real investment.
“Given our focus on building on the proven technology of Stadia as well as deepening our business partnerships, we’ve decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E, beyond any near-term planned games,” Google exec Phil Harrison said in a blog post.
The tech giants
Microsoft’s Azure Quantum platform is now in public preview — Azure Quantum is Microsoft’s cloud-based platform for using quantum hardware and software tools from partners like Honeywell Quantum Solutions, IonQ, 1QBit and others.
Xiaomi sues the US government over blacklisting — The filing, which was submitted on Friday, calls the decision “unlawful and unconstitutional.”
Google now gives you more information about the sites in your search results — Clicking the new hamburger-style menu icon will pop up a new info panel with additional information about the site.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Robotic process automation platform UiPath raises $750M at $35B valuation — The company’s automation platform aims to “transform the way humans work” by giving companies a way to build out and run automations across departments.
Databricks raises $1B at $28B valuation as it reaches $425M ARR — Databricks is a data-and-AI focused company that interacts with corporate information stored in the public cloud.
Weights & Biases raises $45M for its machine learning tools — Weights & Biases says it now has more than 70,000 users across more than 200 enterprises.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Robinhood’s Q4 2020 revenue shows a return to growth — Robinhood has been the world’s most discussed startup over the last week.
Best practices as a service is a key investment theme to watch in 2021 — It’s one thing to give people and businesses tools, and something else to train them to use those tools effectively.
Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana Labs’ Raj Dutt will tell us why they financially tied the knot (twice!) — The new and improved Extra Crunch Live pairs founders and the investors who led their earlier rounds.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Amazon says government demands for user data spiked by 800% in 2020 — Amazon said it processed 27,664 government demands for user data in the last six months of 2020.
What investors need to know about research and inspiration in the COVID-19 era — Remote research will remain the rule even as the worst of the pandemic mercifully ends.
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.
Powered by WPeMatico
Google shuts down its internal Stadia game studios
When Google originally announced Stadia, its cloud gaming service, the company also announced a first-party game studio. Stadia Games and Entertainment was supposed to release exclusive titles for the new platform. And yet, Google has changed its mind and is now shutting down its internal game studios.
“Given our focus on building on the proven technology of Stadia as well as deepening our business partnerships, we’ve decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E, beyond any near-term planned games,” Google Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison wrote in a blog post.
That’s right, the company has yet to release a single game under the Stadia brand but it’s already over. This is an odd move as Google has made some significant investments in the space. It originally created a studio in Montreal Canada and acquired Typhoon Studios. It then opened another studio in Los Angeles.
Jade Raymond was leading Google’s first-party studios. She has been working in the video game industry for more than 15 years. In particular, she was a producer for Ubisoft in Montreal working on the first Assassin’s Creed games. She also worked for Electronic Arts on an unreleased single-player Star Wars video game.
Today’s news also means that Raymond is leaving Google. Other Google employees working for Stadia Games and Entertainment will move on to new roles.
Going forward, Stadia will focus on third-party games. The company says that Cyberpunk 2077 has been quite popular on the cloud gaming platform for instance. It lets you launch the game on a server in a data center near you and stream the video feed to your device.
Many readers will likely think that Google might shut down Stadia soon as the company has shut down many, many services in the past. The company tries to be reassuring.
“We’re committed to the future of cloud gaming, and will continue to do our part to drive this industry forward. Our goal remains focused on creating the best possible platform for gamers and technology for our partners, bringing these experiences to life for people everywhere,” Harrison writes.
But do you believe him?
Powered by WPeMatico
This Week in Apps: GameStop madness hits trading apps, Apple privacy changes, Clubhouse becomes a unicorn
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone.
And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.
Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.
This week, we’re taking a look at the biggest news in the world of apps, including how the GameStop frenzy impacted trading apps, as well as how Apple’s privacy changes are taking shape in 2021, and more.
Top Stories
The internet comes for the stock market, via trading apps
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Was there really any other app news story this week, beside the GameStop short squeeze? That a group of Reddit users took on the hedge funds was the stuff of legends, even if the reality was that Wall Street likely got in on both sides of the trade. Whether you found yourself in the camp of admiring the spectacle or watching the train wreck in horror (or both), what we witnessed — at long last, I suppose — was the internet coming for the stock market. The GameStop frenzy upended the status quo; it rattled the traditional ways of doing things — much like what the internet has done to almost everything else it touches — whether that’s publishing, media, creation, politics, and more.
“This is community,” explained Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, in an interview on AOC’s Twitch channel on Thursday.
“This is something that spans platforms and the internet, especially in the last 10 years — in particular social media and smartphone ubiquity. All these things have connected us in real-time ways to organize around ideas, around concepts,” he continued. “We seek out those communities. We seek out that sense of identity. We seek out that sense of connection. And the internet supercharges it because of scale,” he said. “I think one of the byproducts of where I think it continues to go is more of a push towards decentralization and more of a push toward individuals being able to take ownership — even individuals being able to get access — to do the same things that institutions, historically, had a monopoly on,” Ohanian noted.
Trading app Robinhood and social app Reddit, home to the WallStreetBets forum driving the GameStop push, immediately benefitted from the community-driven effort to squeeze the hedge funds — and jumped to the top of the App Store.
But Robinhood’s subsequent failure to be transparent as to why it was forced to stop customers from buying the “meme” stocks, like GameStop and others (it needed more cash), quickly damaged its reputation. Some investors have now sued for their losses. Others started petitions. And even more began downranking the app with one-star reviews, which Google then removed.
Other trading apps have gained not only during the frenzy itself, but also after, as Robinhood users looked for alternative platforms after being burned by the free trading app.
As of Friday, Robinhood remained at No. 1 on the App Store, but is now being closely trailed on the Top Free iPhone apps chart by No. 2 Webull, No. 6 Fidelity, No. 7 Cash App, No. 12 TD Ameritrade and No. 15 E*TRADE, among others.
Crypto apps are also topping the charts, as users realize the potential of collective action in markets not yet dominated by the billionaires. Coinbase popped to No. 4, while Binance-run apps were at No. 9 and No. 19, Voyager was No. 23 and Kraken No. 24.
In addition, forums where traders can join communities are also continuing to do well, with Reddit at No. 3, Discord at No. 14 and Telegram at No. 28, as of the time of writing.
Google says it will add those Apple privacy labels…sometime!
Image Credits: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Google failed to meet its earlier promised deadline of rolling out privacy labels to its nearly 100-some iOS apps. Its initial estimate followed suggestions (aided by Apple’s typical quiet confirmations to press), that Google had been struggling over how to handle the privacy issues the updates would reveal. This week, Google again said its labels were on the way. But now, it’s not making any specific promises about when those labels would arrive. Instead, the company just said the labels would roll out as Google updated its iOS apps with new features and bug fixes, rather than rolling out the labels to all its apps at once.
However, some Google apps have been updated, including Play Movies & TV, Google Translate, Fiber TV, Fiber, Google Stadia, Google Authenticator, Google Classroom, Smart Lock, Motion Stills, Onduo for Diabetes, Wear OS by Google and Project Baseline — but not Google’s main apps like Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail or its other productivity apps.
Apple’s IDFA changes to begin this spring
Image Credits: Apple (livestream)
Apple announced this week its tracking restrictions for iOS apps are nearing arrival. The changes had initially been pushed back to give developers more time to make updates, but will now arrive in “early spring.”
Once live, the previous opt-out model for sharing your Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) will change to an opt-in model, meaning developers will have to ask users’ permission to track them. Most users will likely say “no,” and be annoyed by the request. Users will also be able to adjust IDFA sharing in Settings on a per-app basis, or on all apps at once.
Facebook has already been warning investors of the ad revenue hit that will result from these changes, which it expects to see in the first quarter earnings. It may also be preparing a lawsuit. Google, meanwhile, said it would be adopting Apple’s SKAdNetwork framework and providing feedback to Apple about its potential improvements.
For years, Apple has been laying the groundwork to establish itself as the company that cares about consumer privacy. And it’s certainly true that no other large tech company has yet to give users this much power to fight back against being tracked around the web and inside apps.
But this is not a case of Apple being the “good guy” while everyone else is “bad” — because the multi-billion-dollar ad industry is not that simple. With a change to its software, Apple has effectively carved out a seat at the table for its own benefit.
What many don’t realize is that Apple watches what its users do across its own platform, inside a number of its first-party apps — including in Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Books, Apple News and the App Store. It then uses that first-party data to personalize the ads it displays in Apple News, Stocks and the App Store.
So while other businesses are tracking users around the web and apps to gain data that lets them better personalize ads at scale, Apple only tracks users inside its own apps and services. (But there sure are a lot of them! And Apple keeps launching new ones, too.)
With the new limits that impact the effectiveness of ads outside of Apple’s ecosystem, advertisers who need to reach a potential customer — say, with an app recommendation — will need to throw more money into Apple-delivered advertising instead. This is because Apple’s ads will be capable of making those more targeted, personalized and, therefore, more effective recommendations.
Apple says it will play by the same rules that it’s asking other developers to abide by. Meaning, if its apps want to track you, they’ll ask. But most of its apps do not “track” using IDFA. Meanwhile, if users want to turn off personalized ads using Apple’s first-party data, that’s a different setting. (Settings –> Privacy –> scroll to bottom –> Apple Advertising –> toggle off Personalized Ads). And no, you won’t be shown a pop-up asking you if that’s a setting you want on or off.
Apple, having masterfully made its case as the privacy-focused company — because wow, isn’t adtech gross? — is now just laying it on. Apple CEO Tim Cook this week blamed the adtech industry for the growth in online extremism, violent incitement (e.g. at the U.S. Capitol) and growing belief in conspiracies, saying companies (cough, Facebook) optimized for engagement and data collection, no matter the damage to society.
Weekly News
Platforms: Apple
- Apple releases iOS 14.4 to iPhone and iPad users. The update patches three critical security vulnerabilities, adds Bluetooth audio monitoring to protect users from levels that could damage hearing, improves the ability for the camera to recognize smaller QR codes, adds a warning if the iPhone 12 has been repaired with non-Apple parts and fixes other bugs.
- Apple reports record-breaking Q1 2021 with $111.4 billion in revenue. The company beat investor expectations on both earnings per share and revenues, with more than the expected $103.3 billion in revenues and $1.68 EPS versus the $1.41 EPS expected. Earnings were driven by new 5G iPhones and a 57% rise in China sales.
- Apple dominates tablet market with 19.2 million iPads shipped in Q4 2020.
- Separately, from the IDFA news, Apple announced this week that Private Click Measurement (PCM) will roll out at the same time as the IDFA changes. PCM measures app-to-web conversions, while SKAdNetwork focuses only on app-to-app conversions. This gives advertisers a way to track the performance of apps that run inside ads that send users to websites.
- A researcher discovered a new iOS security system in iOS 14, BlastDoor, which offers a new sandbox system for processing iMessages data.
- The Washington Post checks in on Apple’s App Store privacy labels and finds many of them were wrong.
Platforms: Google
- Google Play Store updates its policies on gamified loyalty programs following confusion in India. Real gambling apps are still not permitted in India, but developers now will have better clarity on rules.
- Google Play Store opened to Android Auto apps in December, but only for closed testing. This week, it expanded to open testing, meaning there’s no limit to the number of users who can download the app — the next step toward launching to all users in production.
Gaming
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
- U.S. consumer spend in mobile simulation games up 61.8% in 2020, reports Sensor Tower. Top titles included Roblox and Township by Playrix.
Entertainment & Streaming
- Netflix can now stream studio-quality audio on Android 9 and newer devices, specifically Extended HE-AAC with MPEG-D DRC (xHE-AAC). This codec improves sound in noisy conditions and adapts to variable cellular connections.
- Spotify tests audiobooks. The company released a small selection of nine exclusive audiobook recordings from books in the public domain. The narrators included big names like David Dobrik, Forest Whitaker, Hilary Swank and Cynthia Erivo, to determine if there’s consumer demand for this sort of content.
- Spotify also tests a feature that inserts “slow down” songs in playlists when users approach school zones. The feature was being tried in Australia.
- YouTube said its TikTok rival, YouTube Shorts, was seeing 3.5 billion views per day during tests in India.
Security & Privacy
- Apple says iOS 14.4 fixes three security bugs that may have been exploited by hackers. Details were scarce but two of the bugs were found in WebKit. Apple wouldn’t say how many users may have been impacted.
- TikTok fixed a vulnerability that would have allowed for the theft of private user information.
- WhatsApp added a biometric authentication to its web and desktop apps to make authentication more secure for its over 2 billion users.
- A location broker called X-Mode was discovered to still be tracking users via Apple and Android apps, despite app store bans. The broker sold data collected in apps — like unofficial transportation app New York Subway, Video MP3 Converter and Moco — to U.S. military contractors.
Communication
Image Credits: Telegram
- Telegram adds a new feature that would allow users to import their WhatsApp chats and others, making a switch easier. The feature appears in version 7.4, and supports WhatsApp, Line and KakaoTalk import on iOS and Android.
Social & Photos
Image Credits: Instagram
- Instagram launches a professional dashboard for creators and small business. The new in-app destination offers centralized access to tools for tracking performance, discovering insights and trends, growing your business and staying informed through access to educational resources.
- Facebook expands its Facebook News portal to the U.K., its first international market.
- TikTok owner ByteDance’s revenue more than doubled in 2020, according to The Information, to about $37 billion.
- Snapchat launched a digital literacy program aimed at educating users about data privacy and security. The program teaches users how to turn on two-factor and introduced a new filter that connects users to privacy resources.
- Twitter launches Birdwatch, a community-based approach to handling misinformation on its platform. The system allows users to identify misleading info in tweets and write notes that provide information and context, in a sort of Wikipedia-like model. Eventually, these notes will be made visible directly on tweets for all to read, after consensus from a broad and diverse group of editors is achieved.
- QAnon moves to a free-speech focused TikTok clone called Clapper, which is a new home to some of the Parler crowd. ToS violations coming in 3, 2, 1…
- TikTok was found to be hosting a number of vape sellers who were clearly marketing toward minors, promising no ID checks and discreet packaging to hide vape purchases from parents.
Health & Fitness
- Apple expands its new Apple Fitness+ service with “Time to Walk,” a feature that offers inspiring audio stories from guests like country music icon Dolly Parton, NBA player Draymond Green, musician Shawn Mendes, Emmy Award winner Uzo Aduba and others. The launch indicates Apple understands how to make the service more broadly appealing to reach beyond those who are already deeply committed to their regular exercise routines.
- Health and Fitness app downloads grew 30% in 2020, reports App Annie, from $1.5 billion in consumer spend in 2019 to $2 billion in 2020, and from 2 billion downloads to 2.6 billion. On Android phones, time spent was up 25%.
Government & Policy
- Italy’s data protection agency gave TikTok a deadline to respond its order to block all users whose age it can’t verify following the death of a 10-year-old girl who repeated a dangerous “challenge” on the social app.
- Iran blocked the Signal messaging app after the WhatsApp exodus sent a flood of users to the open-source, encrypted communication service.
- India said it will continue its ban on TikTok, UC Browser and 57 other Chinese apps that the country first banned last June, saying the responses the companies provided didn’t adequately address the cybersecurity concerns. TikTok owner ByteDance said it’s closing its India operations and laying off 1,800 employees.
- Norway’s data protection agency notified U.S.-based dating app Grindr for violation of GDPR consent violations, which carry a fine of around $12.1 million USD.
Funding and M&A
Image Credits: Freepik / Kristina Astakhova (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
- Buzzy voice chat app Clubhouse raises $100 million, valuing the business at $1 billion. Despite being launched under a year ago and remaining an invite-only experience for the time being, the app has been carving out a new form of audio-based social networking. With now over 180 investors and a pandemic coming to an end — perhaps — with the vaccine rollout, Clubhouse will soon have to prove it has value in a reopened world where there’s more to do, including, once again, networking events and conferences. It will also eventually have to contend with what sort of app it becomes when it finally opens up to the public. So far, its private, insiders-only atmosphere has given it something of a protected status. Though conversations have turned toxic at times, only a few users ever heard them — and there’s no transcript. When the world piles in, however, Clubhouse could not only lose its exclusive appeal but also become host to conversations that do real harm.
Twitter is working to include the “
Newsletters” item in the menu in the web app, which shows the popup about @revue above pic.twitter.com/ATaXDGr0zc
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) January 27, 2021
- Twitter acquires newsletter platform Revue, a Substack rival, to get its users a way to monetize their Twitter fan base. Despite only announcing this week, the company is already integrating Newsletters on its web app.
- Edtech app ClassDojo raises $30 million led by Product Hunt CEO Josh Buckley. The app has boomed during the pandemic as schools and teachers needed a new way to communicate with families at home.
- Scheduling startup Calendly raises $350 million for its cloud-based service that helps people set up and confirm meeting times with one another. The round values the business at $3 billion.
- Virtual social network IMVU raises $35 million from China’s NetEase and others. The app lets users create virtual rooms and chat with strangers using custom avatars.
- Short-form video app Clash acquires would-be TikTok rival Byte, created by a former Vine founder.
- IAC’s Teltech, home to Robokiller, acquires encrypted messaging app Confide, in an unannounced deal. Terms were not revealed but included the app and IP, not the team.
Image Credits: Confide
- Opal raises $4.3 million for its digital well-being assistant for iPhone that blocks you from distracting apps and websites.
- Finance tracking and budgeting app Brigit raises $35 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from DCM, Nyca, Canaan, DN Capital, CRV, Core, Shasta, Hummingbird, Abstract, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Secocha, NBA star Kevin Durant, Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and Flourish Ventures.
- SoftBank-backed Travel platform Klook raises $200 million in a round led by Aspex Management. The startup, which helps users book activities in overseas destinations, had been impacted by the pandemic, so pivoted to “staycation” activities and service for local merchants.
- Video software company Vimeo raises $300 million in equity from funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Oberndorf Enterprises, LLC at a valuation in excess of $5 billion.
- RuneScape publisher Jagex has been acquired by investment firm The Carlyle Group for at least $530 million. The British video game publisher creates both PC and mobile games, including a mobile version of RuneScape with 8 million installs in 2019.
- Appointment booking app Booksy raises $70 million to acquire other salon appointment apps and expand internationally. The round was led by Cat Rock Capital with participation from Sprints Capital.
- Fintech startup Albert raises $100 million in Series C funding led by General Atlantic. The funds will be used to expand its financial wellness service now used by over 5 million people to help save, budget and more.
- Dating app S’More raises $2.1 million for its concept where users photos’ are initially blurred.
- Stacker raises $1.7 million seed round for its platform that lets non-developers build apps using spreadsheets from Google Sheets or Airtable.
- Kuaishou, ByteDance’s main rival in China, raises $5.4B in Hong Kong IPO, valuing the business at $61B
Downloads
Opal
Image Credits: Opal
Opal offers a digital well-being assistant for iPhone that allows you to block distracting websites and apps, set schedules around app usage, lock down apps for stricter and more focused quiet periods and more. The service works by way of a VPN system that limits your access to apps and sites. But unlike some VPNs on the market, Opal is committed to not collecting any personal data on its users or their private browsing data. Instead, its business model is based on paid subscriptions, not selling user data, it says. The freemium service lets you upgrade to its full feature set for $59.99/year.
Charlie
Image Credits: Charlie
Founded by a former mobile game industry vet, Charlie “gamifies” getting out of debt using techniques that worked in gaming, like progress bars, fun auto-save rules that can be triggered by almost any activity, celebrations with confetti and more. The app plans to expand into a fuller fintech product in time to help users refinance debt at a lower rate and bill pay directly from the app.
Powered by WPeMatico
Google’s BeyondCorp Enterprise security platform is now generally available
Google today announced that BeyondCorp Enterprise, the zero trust security platform modeled after how Google itself keeps its network safe without relying on a VPN, is now generally available. BeyondCorp Enterprise builds out Google’s existing BeyondCorp Remote Access offering with additional enterprise features. Google describes it as “a zero trust solution that enables secure access with integrated threat and data protection.”
Over the course of the last few years, Google — and especially its Cloud unit — has evangelized the zero trust model and built a large partner network around this idea. Those partners include the likes of Check Point, Citrix, CrowdStrike, Symantec and VMWare.
As part of BeyondCorp Enterprise, businesses get an end-to-end zero trust solution that includes everything from DDoS protection and phishing-resistant authentication, to the new security features in the Chrome browser and the core continuous authorization features that protect every interaction between users and resources protected by BeyondCorp.
“The rapid move to the cloud and remote work are creating dynamic work environments that promise to drive new levels of productivity and innovation. But they have also opened the door to a host of new security concerns and sparked a significant increase in cyberattacks,” said Fermin Serna, chief information security officer at Citrix. “To defend against them, enterprises must take an intelligent approach to workspace security that protects employees without getting in the way of their experience following the zero trust model.”
Powered by WPeMatico
This Week in Apps: TikTok viral hit breaks Spotify records, inauguration boosts news app installs, judge rules against Parler
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020.
Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.
Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.
This week, we’re looking into how President Biden’s inauguration impacted news apps, the latest in the Parler lawsuit, and how TikTok’s app continues to shape culture, among other things.
Top Stories
Judge says Amazon doesn’t have to host Parler on AWS
Logos for AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Parler. Image Credits: TechCrunch
U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle this week ruled that Amazon won’t be required to restore access to web services to Parler. As you may recall, Parler sued Amazon for booting it from AWS’ infrastructure, effectively forcing it offline. Like Apple and Google before it, Amazon had decided that the calls for violence that were being spread on Parler violated its terms of service. It also said that Parler showed an “unwillingness and inability” to remove dangerous posts that called for the rape, torture and assassination of politicians, tech executives and many others, the AP reported.
Amazon’s decision shouldn’t have been a surprise for Parler. Amazon had reported 98 examples of Parler posts that incited violence over the past several weeks before its decision. It told Parler these were clear violations of the terms of service.
Parler’s lawsuit against Amazon, however, went on to claim breach of contract and even made antitrust allegations.
The judge shot down Parler’s claims that Amazon and Twitter were colluding over the decision to kick the app off AWS. Parler’s claims over breach of contract were denied, too, as the contract had never said Amazon had to give Parler 30 days to fix things. (Not to mention the fact that Parler breached the contract on its side, too.) It also said Parler had fallen short in demonstrating the need for an injunction to restore access to Amazon’s web services.
The ruling only blocks Parler from forcing Amazon to again host it as the lawsuit proceeds, but is not the final ruling in the overall case, which is continuing.
TikTok drives another pop song to No. 1 on Billboard charts, breaks Spotify’s record
@livbedumb♬ drivers license – Olivia Rodrigo
We already knew TikTok was playing a large role in influencing music charts and listening behavior. For example, Billboard last year noted how TikTok drove hits from Sony artists like Doja Cat (“Say So”) and 24kGoldn (“Mood”), and helped Sony discover new talent. Columbia also signed viral TikTok artists like Lil Nas X, Powfu, StaySolidRocky, Jawsh 685, Arizona Zervas and 24kGoldn. Meanwhile, Nielsen has said that no other app had helped break more songs in 2020 than TikTok.
This month, we’ve witnessed yet another example of this phenomenon. Olivia Rodrigo, the 17-year-old star of Disney+’s “High School Musical: The Musical: the Series” released her latest song, “Drivers License” on January 8. The pop ballad and breakup anthem is believed to be referencing the actress’ relationship with co-star Joshua Bassett, which gave the song even more appeal to fans.
Upon its release the song was heavily streamed by TikTok users, which helped make it an overnight sensation of sorts. According to a report by The WSJ, Billboard counted 76.1 million streams and 38,000 downloads in the U.S. during the week of its release. It also made a historic debut at No. 1 on the Hot 100, becoming the first smash hit of 2021.
On January 11, “Drivers License” broke Spotify’s record for most streams per day (for a non-holiday song) with 15.17 million global streams. On TikTok, meanwhile, the number of videos featuring the song and the views they received doubled every day, The WSJ said.
Charli D’Amelio’s dance to it on the app has now generated 5 million “Likes” across nearly 33 million views, as of the time of writing.
@charlidamelio♬ drivers license – Olivia Rodrigo
Of course, other TikTok hits have broken out in the past, too — even reaching No. 1 like “Blinding Lights” (The Weeknd) and “Mood” (24kGoldn). But the success of “Drivers License” may be in part due to the way it focuses on a subject that’s more relevant to TikTok’s young, teenage user base. It talks about first loves and being dumped for the other girl. And its title and opening refer to a time many adults have forgotten: the momentous day when you get your driver’s license. It’s highly relatable to the TikTok crowd who fully embraced it and made it a hit.
Weekly News
Platforms: Apple
- Apple stops signing iOS 12.5, making iOS 12.5.1 the only versions of iOS available to older devices.
- A report claims Apple’s iOS 15 update will cut support for devices with an A9 chip, like the iPhone 6, iPhone 6s Plus and the original iPhone SE.
- New analysis estimates Apple’s upcoming iOS privacy changes will cause a roughly 7% revenue hit for Facebook in Q2. The revenue hit will continue in following quarters and will be “material.”
Platforms: Google
- Google adds “trending” icons to the Play Store. New arrow icons appeared in the Top Charts tab, which indicate whether an app’s downloads are trending up or down, in terms of popularity. This could provide an early signal about those that may still be rising in the charts or beginning to fall out of favor, despite their current high position.
- Google appears to be working on a Restricted Networking mode for Android 12. The mode, discovered by XDA Developers digging in the Android Open Source Project, would disable network access for all third-party apps.
Gaming
- Goama (or Go Games) introduced a way for developers to integrate social games into their apps, which was showcased at CES. The company focuses on Asia and Latin America and has more than 15 partners, including GCash and Rappi, for digital payments and communications.
- Fortnite maker Epic Games is getting into movies. The animated feature film Gilgamesh will use Epic’s Unreal Engine technology to tell the story of the king-turned-deity. The movie is not an in-house project, but rather is financed through Epic’s $100M MegaGrants fund.
Augmented Reality
- Patents around Apple’s AR and VR efforts describe how a system could be identified in a way that’s similar to FaceID, then either permitted or denied the ability to change their appearance in the game.
- Pinterest launches AR try-on for eyeshadow in its mobile app using Lens technology and ModiFace data. The app already offered AR try-on for lipsticks.
Entertainment
- The CW app became the No. 1 app on the App Store this week, topping TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, thanks to CW’s season premieres of Batwoman, All American, Riverdale and Nancy Drew.
- Users of podcasting app Anchor, owned by Spotify, say the app isn’t bringing them any sponsorship opportunities, as promised, beyond those from Spotify and Anchor itself.
- YouTube launches hashtag landing pages on the web and in its mobile app. The pages are accessible when you click hashtags on YouTube, not via search, and weirdly rank the “best” videos through some inscrutable algorithm.
- Apple’s Podcasts app adds a new editorial feature, Apple Podcasts Spotlight, meant to increase podcast listening by showcasing the best podcasts as selected by Apple editors.
E-commerce
- WeChat facilitated 1.6 trillion yuan (close to $250 billion) in annual transactions through its “mini programs” in 2020. The figure is more than double that of 2019.
Fintech
- Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, launched an e-wallet, Douyin Pay. The wallet will supplement the existing payment options, Alipay and WeChat Pay, and will help to support the Douyin app’s growing e-commerce business.
- Neobank Monzo founder Tom Blomfield left the startup, saying he struggled during the pandemic. “I think [for] a lot of people in the world…going through a pandemic, going through lockdown and the isolation involved in that has an impact on people’s mental health,” he told TechCrunch.
- New estimates indicate about 50% of the iPhone user base (or 507 million users) now use Apple Pay.
- Samsung’s newest phones drop support for MST, which emulates a mag stripe at terminals that don’t support NFC.
Social
- Indian messaging app, StickerChat, owned by Hike, is shutting down. Founder Kavin Bharti Mittal said India will never have a homegrown messenger unless it bars Western companies from its market. Hike pivoted this month to virtual social apps, Vibe and Rush, which it believes have more potential.
- Instagram head Adam Mosseri, in a Verge podcast, said he’s not happy with Reels so far, and how he feels most people probably don’t understand the difference between Instagram video and IGTV. He says the social network needs to simplify and consolidate ideas.
- Facebook and Instagram improve their accessibility features. The apps’ AI-generated image captions now offer far more details about who or what is in the photos, thanks to improvements in image recognition systems.
- TikTok launches a Q&A feature that lets creators respond to fan questions using text or videos. The feature, rolled out to select creators with more than 10,000 followers, makes it easier to see all the questions in one place.
Health & Fitness
- Health and fitness app spending jumped 70% last year in Europe to record $544 million, a Sensor Tower report says. The year-over-year increase is far larger than 2019, when growth was just 37.2%. COVID-19 played a large role in this shift as people turned to fitness apps instead of gyms to stay in shape.
Government & Policy
- Biden’s inauguration boosted installs of U.S. news apps up to 170%, Sensor Tower reported. CNN was the biggest mover, climbing 530 positions to reach No. 41 on the App Store, and up 170% in terms of downloads. News Break was the second highest, climbing 13 positions to No. 65. Right-wing outlet Newsmax climbed 43 spots to reach No. 108. In 2020, the top news apps were: News Break (23.7 million installs); SmartNews (9 million); CNN (5 million); and Fox News (4 million). This month, however, News Break saw 1.2 million installs, followed by Newsmax with about 863,000 installs, the report said.
- Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) sent a draft decision to fellow EU Data Protection Authorities over the WhatsApp-Facebook data sharing policy. This means a decision on the matter is coming closer to a resolution in terms of what standards of transparency is required by WhatsApp.
- German app developer Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents filed a complaint with the EU, U.S. DOJ and other antitrust watchdogs around the world over Apple and Google’s rejection of his COVID-related mobile game. Both stores had policies to only approve official COVID-19 apps from health authorities. Mueller renamed the game Viral Days and removed references to the novel coronavirus to get the app approved. However, he still feels the stores’ rules are holding back innovation.
Productivity
- Basecamp’s Hey, which famously fought back against Apple’s App Store rules over IAP last year, has launched a business-focused platform, Hey for Work, expected to be public in Q1. The app has more App Store ratings than rival Superhuman, a report found. Currently, Hey has a 4.7-star rating across 3.3K reviews; Superhuman has 3.9 rating across only 274 reviews.
Trends
- Baby boomers are increasingly using apps. Baby boomers/Gen Xers in the U.S. spent 30% more time year-over-year in their most used apps, App Annie reports. That’s a larger increase than either Millennials or Gen Z, at 18% and 16%, respectively.
Funding and M&A
- Curtsy, a clothing resale app for Gen Z women, raised an $11 million Series A led by Index Ventures. The app tackles some of the problems with online resale by sending shipping supplies and labels to sellers, and by making the marketplace accessible to new and casual sellers.
- Storytelling platform Wattpad acquired by South Korea’s Naver for $600 million. The reading apps whose stories have turned into book and Netflix hits will be incorporated into Naver’s publishing platform Webtoon.
- On-demand delivery app Glovo partnered with Swiss-based real estate firm, Stoneweg, which is investing €100 million in building and refurbishing real estate in key markets to build out Glovo’s network of “dark stores.”
- Pocket Casts app is up for sale. The podcast app was acquired nearly three years ago by a public radio consortium of top podcast producers (NPR, WNYC Studios, WBEZ Chicago and This American Life). The owners have now agreed to sell the app, which posted a net loss in 2020. (NPR’s share of the loss was over $800,000.)
- Travel app Maps.me raised $50 million in a round led by Alameda Research. The funding will go toward the launch of a multi-currency wallet. Cryptocurrency lender Genesis Capital and institutional cryptocurrency firm CMS Holdings also participated in the round, Coindesk reported.
- Bangalore-based hyperlocal delivery app Dunzo raised $40 million in a round that included investment from Google, Lightbox, Evolvence, Hana Financial Investment, LGT Lightstone Aspada and Alteria.
- London-based food delivery app Deliveroo raised $180 million in new funding from existing investors, led by Durable Capital Partners and Fidelity Management, valuing the business at more than $7 billion.
- Dating Group acquired Swiss startup Once, a dating app that sends one match per day, for $18 million.
Downloads
Bodyguard
Image Credits: Bodyguard
A French content moderation app called Bodyguard, detailed here by TechCrunch, has brought its service to the English-speaking market. The app allows you to choose the level of content moderation you want to see on top social networks, like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Twitch. You can choose to hide toxic content across a range of categories, like insults, body shaming, moral harassment, sexual harassment, racism and homophobia and indicate whether the content is a low or high priority to block.
Beeper
Image Credits: Beeper
Pebble’s founder and current YC Partner Eric Migicovsky has launched a new app, Beeper, that aims to centralize in one interface 15 different chat apps, including iMessage. The app relies on an open-source federated, encrypted messaging protocol called Matrix that uses “bridges” to connect to the various networks to move the messages. However, iMessage support is more wonky, as the company actually ships you an old iPhone to make the connection to the network. But this system allows you to access Beeper on non-Apple devices, the company says. The app is slowly onboarding new users due to initial demand. The app works across MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android and charges $10/mo for the service.
Powered by WPeMatico
Google refreshes its mobile search experience
Google today announced a subtle but welcome refresh of its mobile search experience. The idea here is to provide easier to read search results and a more modern look with a simpler, edge-to-edge design.
From what we’ve seen so far, this is not a radically different look, but the rounded and slightly shaded boxes around individual search results have been replaced with straight lines, for example, while in other places, Google has specifically added more roundness. You’ll find changes to the circles around the search bar and some tweaks to the Google logo. “We believe it feels more approachable, friendly and human,” a Google spokesperson told me. There’s a bit more whitespace in places, too, as well as new splashes of color that are meant to help separate and emphasize certain parts of the page.
Image Credits: Google
“Rethinking the visual design for something like Search is really complex,” Google designer Aileen Cheng said in today’s announcement. “That’s especially true given how much Google Search has evolved. We’re not just organizing the web’s information, but all the world’s information. We started with organizing web pages, but now there’s so much diversity in the types of content and information we have to help make sense of.”
Image Credits: Google
Google is also extending its use of the Google Sans font, which you are probably already quite familiar with thanks to its use in Gmail and Android. “Bringing consistency to when and how we use fonts in Search was important, too, which also helps people parse information more efficiently,” Cheng writes.
In many ways, today’s refresh is a continuation of the work Google did with its mobile search refresh in 2019. At that time, the emphasis, too, was on making it easier for users to scan down the page by adding site icons and other new visual elements to the page. The work of making search results pages more readable is clearly never done.
For the most part, though, comparing the new and old design, the changes are small. This isn’t some major redesign — we’re talking about minor tweaks that the designers surely obsessed over but that the users may not even really notice. Now if Google had made it significantly easier to distinguish ads from the content you are actually looking for, that would’ve been something.
Image Credits: Google
Powered by WPeMatico
Extra Crunch roundup: 2 VC surveys, Tesla’s melt up, The Roblox Gambit, more
This has been quite a week.
Instead of walking backward through the last few days of chaos and uncertainty, here are three good things that happened:
- Google employee Sara Robinson combined her interest in machine learning and baking to create AI-generated hybrid treats.
- A breakthrough could make water desalination 30%-40% more effective.
- Bianca Smith will become the first Black woman to coach a professional baseball team.
Despite many distractions in our first full week of the new year, we published a full slate of stories exploring different aspects of entrepreneurship, fundraising and investing.
We’ve already gotten feedback on this overview of subscription pricing models, and a look back at 2020 funding rounds and exits among Israel’s security startups was aimed at our new members who live and work there, along with international investors who are seeking new opportunities.
Plus, don’t miss our first investor surveys of 2021: one by Lucas Matney on social gaming, and another by Mike Butcher that gathered responses from Portugal-based investors on a wide variety of topics.
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week. I hope we can all look forward to a nice, boring weekend with no breaking news alerts.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription
The Roblox Gambit
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
In February 2020, gaming platform Roblox was valued at $4 billion, but after announcing a $520 million Series H this week, it’s now worth $29.5 billion.
“Sure, you could argue that Roblox enjoyed an epic 2020, thanks in part to COVID-19,” writes Alex Wilhelm this morning. “That helped its valuation. But there’s a lot of space between $4 billion and $29.5 billion.”
Alex suggests that Roblox’s decision to delay its IPO and raise an enormous Series H was a grandmaster move that could influence how other unicorns will take themselves to market. “A big thanks to the gaming company for running this experiment for us.”
I asked him what inspired the headline; like most good ideas, it came to him while he was trying to get to sleep.
“I think that I had ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ somewhere in my head, so that formed the root of a little joke with myself. Roblox is making a strategic wager on method of going public. So, ‘gambit’ seems to fit!”
8 investors discuss social gaming’s biggest opportunities
Image Credits: Erik Von Weber (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
For our first investor survey of the year, Lucas Matney interviewed eight VCs who invest in massively multiplayer online games to discuss 2021 trends and opportunities:
- Hope Cochran, Madrona Venture Group
- Daniel Li, Madrona Venture Group
- Niko Bonatsos, General Catalyst
- Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Sakib Dadi, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Jacob Mullins, Shasta Ventures
- Alice Lloyd George, Rogue
- Gigi Levy-Weiss, NFX
Having moved far beyond shooters and sims, platforms like Twitch, Discord and Fortnite are “where culture is created,” said Daniel Li of Madrona.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses Twitch to explain policy positions, major musicians regularly perform in-game concerts on Fortnite and in-game purchases generated tens of billions last year.
“Gaming is a unique combination of science and art, left and right brain,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss of NFX. “It’s never just science (i.e., software and data), which is why many investors find it hard.”
How to convert customers with subscription pricing
Image Credits: C.J. Burton (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Startups that lack insight into their sales funnel have high churn, low conversion rates and an inability to adapt or leverage changes in customer behavior.
If you’re hoping to convert and retain customers, “reinforcing your value proposition should play a big part in every level of your customer funnel,” says Joe Procopio, founder of Teaching Startup.
What is up with Tesla’s value?
Image Credits: Bloomberg (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Alex Wilhelm followed up his regular Friday column with another story that tries to find a well-grounded rationale for Tesla’s sky-high valuation of approximately $822 billion.
Meanwhile, GM just unveiled a new logo and tagline.
As ever, I learned something new while editing: A “melt up” occurs when investors start clamoring for a particular company because of acute FOMO (the fear of missing out).
Delivering 500,000 cars in 2020 was “impressive,” says Alex, who also acknowledged the company’s ability to turn GAAP profits, but “pride cometh before the fall, as does a melt up, I think.”
Note: This story has Alex’s original headline, but I told him I would replace the featured image with a photo of someone who had very “richest man in the world” face.
How Segment redesigned its core systems to solve an existential scaling crisis
Image Credits: piranka / Getty Images
On Tuesday, enterprise reporter Ron Miller covered a major engineering project at customer data platform Segment called “Centrifuge.”
“Its purpose was to move data through Segment’s data pipes to wherever customers needed it quickly and efficiently at the lowest operating cost,” but as Ron reports, it was also meant to solve “an existential crisis for the young business,” which needed a more resilient platform.
Dear Sophie: Banging my head against the wall understanding the US immigration system
Image Credits: Sophie Alcorn
Dear Sophie:
Now that the U.S. has a new president coming in whose policies are more welcoming to immigrants, I am considering coming to the U.S. to expand my company after COVID-19. However, I’m struggling with the morass of information online that has bits and pieces of visa types and processes.
Can you please share an overview of the U.S. immigration system and how it works so I can get the big picture and understand what I’m navigating?
— Resilient in Romania
The first “Dear Sophie” column of each month is available on TechCrunch without a paywall.
Revenue-based financing: The next step for private equity and early-stage investment
Image Credits: Hiraman (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
For founders who aren’t interested in angel investment or seeking validation from a VC, revenue-based investing is growing in popularity.
To gain a deeper understanding of the U.S. RBI landscape, we published an industry report on Wednesday that studied data from 134 companies, 57 funds and 32 investment firms before breaking out “specific verticals and business models … and the typical profile of companies that access this form of capital.”
Lisbon’s startup scene rises as Portugal gears up to be a European tech tiger
Image Credits: Westend61 (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
Mike Butcher continues his series of European investor surveys with his latest dispatch from Lisbon, where a nascent startup ecosystem may get a Brexit boost.
Here are the Portugal-based VCs he interviewed:
- Cristina Fonseca, partner, Indico Capital Partners
- Pedro Ribeiro Santos, partner, Armilar Venture Partners
- Tocha, partner, Olisipo Way
- Adão Oliveira, investment manager, Portugal Ventures
- Alexandre Barbosa, partner, Faber
- António Miguel, partner, Mustard Seed MAZE
- Jaime Parodi Bardón, partner, impACT NOW Capital
- Stephan Morais, partner, Indico Capital Partners
- Gavin Goldblatt, managing partner, Portugal Gateway
How late-stage edtech companies are thinking about tutoring marketplaces
Image Credits: John Lund (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
How do you scale online tutoring, particularly when demand exceeds the supply of human instructors?
This month, Chegg is replacing its seven-year-old marketplace that paired students with tutors with a live chatbot.
A spokesperson said the move will “dramatically differentiate our offerings from our competitors and better service students,” but Natasha Mascarenhas identified two challenges to edtech automation.
“A chatbot won’t work for a student with special needs or someone who needs to be handheld a bit more,” she says. “Second, speed tutoring can only work for a specific set of subjects.”
Decrypted: How bad was the US Capitol breach for cybersecurity?
Image Credits: Treedeo (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
While I watched insurrectionists invade and vandalize the U.S. Capitol on live TV, I noticed that staffers evacuated so quickly, some hadn’t had time to shut down their computers.
Looters even made off with a laptop from Senator Jeff Merkley’s office, but according to security reporter Zack Whittaker, the damages to infosec wasn’t as bad as it looked.
Even so, “the breach will likely present a major task for Congress’ IT departments, which will have to figure out what’s been stolen and what security risks could still pose a threat to the Capitol’s network.”
Extra Crunch’s top 10 stories of 2020
Image Credits: Catherine Falls Commercial (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
On New Year’s Eve, I made a list of the 10 “best” Extra Crunch stories from the previous 12 months.
My methodology was personal: From hundreds of posts, these were the 10 I found most useful, which is my key metric for business journalism.
Some readers are skeptical about paywalls, but without being boastful, Extra Crunch is a premium product, just like Netflix or Disney+. I know, we’re not as entertaining as a historical drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II or a space western about a bounty hunter. But, speaking as someone who’s worked at several startups, Extra Crunch stories contain actionable information you can use to build a company and/or look smart in meetings — and that’s worth something.
Powered by WPeMatico
Google and Snap in talks to invest in India’s ShareChat
ShareChat, an Indian social network that added Twitter as an investor in 2019, may soon receive the backing of two more American firms.
The Bangalore-based startup is in advanced stages of talks to raise money from Google and Snap, as well as several existing investors, including Twitter, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The new financing round — a Series E — is slated to be larger than $200 million, with Google alone financing more than $100 million of it, four sources said, requesting anonymity as the talks are private. The round values ShareChat at more than $1 billion, two of the sources said.
ShareChat, Google and Snap did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ShareChat has raised about $264 million to date and was valued at nearly $700 million last year.
The terms of the deal could change and the talks may not materialize into an investment, the sources cautioned. Local TV channel ET Now reported last year that Google was in talks to acquire ShareChat.
ShareChat’s marquee and eponymous app caters to users in 15 Indian languages and has a large following in small Indian cities and towns. Twitter and Snap, on the other hand, are struggling to gain users beyond urban cities in the world’s second-largest internet market. Both Twitter and Snapchat have about 50 million monthly active users in India, according to a popular mobile insight firm.
In an interview with TechCrunch last year, Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and chief executive of ShareChat, said the app was growing “exponentially” and that users were spending, on average, more than 30 minutes on the app each day.
If the deal goes through, it would be the first investment from Snapchat’s parent company into an Indian startup. Google, on the other hand, has been on a spree of late. The Android-maker last month invested in DailyHunt and InMobi’s Glance, both of which operate short-video apps.
Like the two, ShareChat also operates a short-video app. Its app, called Moj, had amassed more than 80 million monthly active users as of September last year, the startup said at the time. Several of these short videos apps, as well as Times Internet’s MX TakaTak (operated by MX Player), have witnessed an accelerated growth in recent quarters thanks in part to New Delhi banning ByteDance’s TikTok and hundreds of other Chinese apps mid-last year.
Last year, Google announced that it plans to invest $10 billion in India over the course of five to seven years. Days later, the company invested $4.5 billion in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms. Google and Facebook, which invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms last year, reach more than 400 million users in the country.
Google, Facebook, ShareChat, DailyHunt and Glance generate most of their revenue through ads. About 85% of the ad market in India is currently commanded by Facebook and Google, analysts at Bank of America wrote in a report to clients last year. “We estimate this market to be $10 billion by 2024 and see room for Facebook to increase its market-share by 4 percentage points in 4 years led by partnership with Jio. We estimate Facebook may have $4.7 billion revenues by 2024,” they wrote in the equity research report, obtained by TechCrunch.
Powered by WPeMatico
Google pilots a search feature that aggregates short-form videos from TikTok and Instagram
Google is testing a new feature that will surface Instagram and TikTok videos in their own dedicated carousel in the Google app for mobile devices — a move that could help the company retain users in search of social video entertainment from fully leaving Google’s platform. The feature itself expands on a test launched earlier this year, where Google had first introduced a carousel of “Short Videos” within Google Discover — the personalized feed found in the Google mobile app and to the left of the home screen on some Android devices.
To be clear, this “Short Videos” carousel is different from Google’s Stories, which rolled out in October 2020 to the Google Search app for iOS and Android. Those “Stories” — previously known as “AMP Stories” — consist of short-form video content created by Google’s online publishing partners like Forbes, USA Today, Vice, Now This, Bustle, Thrillist and others.
Meanwhile, the “Short Videos” carousel had been focused on aggregating social video from other platforms, including Google’s own short-form video project Tangi, Indian TikTok competitor Trell, as well as Google’s own video platform, YouTube — which has also been experimenting with short-form content as of late.
The expansion to include Instagram and TikTok content in this carousel was first reported by Search Engine Roundtable (via Brian Freiesleben’s tweet). They were able to access the feature by searching for “packers” in the Google app then scrolling down the page.
We were able to replicate this, as well. (See below image.)
Image Credits: screenshot of Google search results
We found the Short Videos carousel appears when you scroll past the Google Knowledge Base box for the Green Bay Packers, followed by the the scores, Top Stories, Twitter results, Top Results, Images, Videos and other content, like a listing of the players, standings and more.
Both Instagram and TikTok videos were available in the Short Videos row. When clicked, you’re taken to the web version of the social platform — not the native mobile app, even if it’s installed on your device. The end result is that Google users are more likely to remain on Google, as all it takes is a tap on the back arrow to return to the search results after watching the video.
Google has been indexing video content for years and partnered with Twitter on 2015 to index search results. It’s not clear to what extent it has any formal relationship with Facebook/Instagram or TikTok, however. (If those companies comment, we’ll update.)
Google declined to formally comment or further detail its plans, but a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch the feature was currently being piloted on mobile devices. They clarified that means it’s a limited, early-stage feature. In other words, you won’t find the video carousel on every search query just yet. But over time, as Google scales the product, it could become an interesting tool for indexing and surfacing top video content from social media — unless, of course, the platforms choose to block Google from doing so.
The feature is currently available in a limited way on the Google app for mobile devices and on the mobile web, the company said.
Powered by WPeMatico