Podcasts
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Twitter buys a startup to battle harassment, e-cigs are booming, and a meditation app is worth $250M
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley Editor Connie Loizos and I jammed out on a couple of topics as Alex Wilhelm was out managing his fake stock game spreadsheets or something. (The jury is out on whether this was a good or bad thing.)
First up is Twitter buying Smyte, a startup targeting fixes for spam and abuse. This is, of course, Twitter’s perennial problem and it’s one that it’s been trying to fix for some time — but definitely not there yet. The deal terms weren’t disclosed, but Twitter to its credit has seen its stock basically double this year (and almost triple in the past few years). Twitter is going into a big year, with the U.S. midterm elections, the 2018 World Cup, and the Sacramento Kings probably finding some way to screw up in the NBA draft. This’ll be a close one to watch over the next few months as we get closer to the finals for the World Cup and the elections. Twitter is trying to bill itself as a home for news, focusing on live video, and a number of other things.
Then we have Juul Labs, an e-cigarette company that is somehow worth $10 billion. The Information reports that the PAX Labs spinout from 2015 has gone from a $250 million valuation all the way to $10 billion faster than you can name each scooter company that’s raising a new $200 million round from Sequoia that will have already been completed by the time you finish this sentence. Obviously the original cigarette industry was a complicated one circa the 20th century, so this one will be an interesting one to play out over the next few years.
Finally, we have meditation app Calm raising a $27 million round at a $250 million pre-money valuation. Calm isn’t the only mental health-focused startup that’s starting to pick up some momentum, but it’s one that’s a long time coming. I remember stumbling upon Calm.com back in 2012, where you’d just chill out on the website for a minute or so, so it’s fun to see a half-decade or so later that these apps are showing off some impressive numbers.
That’s all for this week, we’ll catch you guys next week. We apologize in advance if Alex makes it back on to the podcast.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocketcast, Downcast and all the casts.
Powered by WPeMatico
Scooters go mad, Opendoor wants to buy your house and Meituan’s IPO
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week was something of a first for the crew, twice. First, we had two guests on the show, and, also, we only made it through two and a half topics. The former is good, the latter is, well, we’ll see.
So, this week Matthew Lynley and I were joined by David Chao, co-founder and general partner at DCM, and Steve Vassallo, a general partner at Foundation Capital. Points to both for being guinea pigs.
Heading into our first topic I’m sorry to inform you that, at least in terms of Equity, scooters are the new Uber. So, we wound up talking about both this week. We started with the fact that Bird is raising new capital at an even more staggering valuation than before ($2 billion!), and that Lime is working to raise a truckload of capital itself. (Reports vary, but it’s probably a $250 million equity round at around a $750 million valuation. There may also be some debt in the mix for Lime. More when we lock that down.)
And, as Chao’s firm is an investor in the space, we had even more to chew on.
Next up we dug into the massive new Opendoor round. The firm’s new $325 million puts it into a solid position to help people sell their houses. Which markets are the best fit was something for us to unspool, along with public market comps, such as they are. But most critical, at least in my view, was the idea of risk. On that point Vassallo made a reasonable argument regarding stress testing. We’ll see.
And finally, we touched on Meituan’s impending IPO, and how it came to be.
Thanks for sticking with Equity after all this time. We’ll be back next week with another round of chatter about the latest, greatest and dumbest that tech has to offer.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
Powered by WPeMatico
Plex adds support for podcasts, debuts personalized mobile apps
At CES in January, TechCrunch broke the news that media software maker Plex was planning to expand its service with the addition of new media content, starting with podcasts. Today, it’s making good on that promise by launching support for podcasts into beta, along with a whole new look and more customization options for its Plex mobile apps.
While Plex got its start as a software application for organizing people’s home media collections, it’s been expanding over the past couple of years to add new features in support of cord cutters who want to watch TV via their antenna, and record those shows. It also acquired the streaming news startup Watchup in order to add a dedicated news hub within its app.
Earlier this year, the company spoke of its ambitions to continue adding more types of content to its media center software, including audio and video podcasts, followed by digital, web-first and other longer-form creator content. (It had originally expected to add podcasts in Q1 2018, so this nearly-June launch is a bit of a delay.)
The larger goal, on Plex’s part, is to organize all your media content in one place – from live and recorded TV to your personal media collections of music, photos, and videos, and your news and information – including, now, your favorite podcasts.
The feature, live today in beta, is available on the Plex web platform, Roku, and iOS and Android, with other device support coming soon.
You can browse and search across Plex’s podcast library, filter podcasts by categories, or click into a title to see the details, episode lists, and related podcasts. To follow that podcast, you click the “Add to My Podcasts” button. This will add the podcast to your “On Deck” dashboard, as well.
If the podcast you like isn’t in the Plex catalog, you can add it by entering the feed URL, and Plex will treat it as if it is – it will retrieve all its metadata, related podcasts, and make it searchable. (That’s useful because Plex’s catalog isn’t as robust as others at launch.)
The feature also includes the standard media controls you’d expect, like forward and back and support for variable speed playback, as well as a “mark as played” option, all available through Plex’s upgraded media player. That option can help you transition to Plex’s podcast platform from another app, as you won’t have to lose your place, in terms of what you’ve listened to, and what you’ve not. And it lets you continually mark off any episodes you may have caught elsewhere, or just otherwise want to skip.
Your listening progress is also synced across Plex’s suite of apps.
The feature wasn’t perfect in brief testing, but it was in a pre-launch state, and today it’s only arriving in beta – so it’s too soon to speak to how well it performs as a publicly facing product.
In a few weeks, Plex will roll out a handful of other features for podcasts, including smart downloading with granular controls for managing the episodes you want to keep on a per show basis (e.g. keep the last three); additional metadata for richer show pages and better discovery options; and podcasts import and export (OPML) so you can move your current subscriptions more easily into Plex.
Along with the launch of podcasts, Plex is updating its mobile apps, too, to offer better customization options.
Now, if you want to listen to your podcasts and news while you’re on the go, on mobile, you can configure the app to show that media on your home screen. Or, if you use the app more for casting your videos to your living room TV, you could bring those favorite shows to the front of the experience instead. And so on.
On this new, customizable home screen you can re-order you content, remove any of its sections (like “Recently Added” or “On Deck,”), or add new ones from elsewhere in the app, including across servers (like Plex Cloud or your local server such as your home PC.)
Plex has also added tabs at the bottom of the screen for switching between your media type (e.g. movies, TV, podcasts, etc.), which are fully customizable, too. You can even customize the default source for each media type.
The addition of podcasts to this more personalized media experience makes sense not only because of how popular podcasts have become, but also because many are tied to the shows you watch – they’re creator commentaries, roundtable discussions, fan chats, critic reviews, and more. It’s easy to imagine, then, moving from watching a show on the TV then heading out and launching the Plex app to listen to the podcast discussing the last episode.
That’s the vision Plex has, at least. However, even with these additions, Plex’s software overall still caters more to the DIY crowd – those who want set up their own antenna, rather than pay for an online TV service like YouTube TV or Sling. And it hasn’t yet solved the problem of media that’s all over the place – favorite shows and movies are strewn across services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Amazon, and it’s hard to know where the things you want to watch reside. Those are still challenges Plex could attack in the future, by becoming a hub that jumps you into streaming catalogs, too.
It’s unclear how well Plex’s expansions have been working to attract new users and paying subscribers.
The company doesn’t break out the latter figure. and it still claims today the same 15 million registered users it had at the beginning of the year. Becoming a podcast player could help bump that number up, though, and introduce more people to Plex’s software, as a result.
Podcasts are in beta on web, mobile and Roku, and the mobile apps are rolling out starting today.
Powered by WPeMatico
The BBC will run its first podcast ads, powered by Acast
The BBC will start running ads in its podcasts, thanks to a partnership with podcast publishing and monetization company Acast.
Acast CEO Ross Adams told me that ads will start running later this week, with the BBC including “bumpers” today announcing the imminent ad launch.
“Podcasts are one way we’re reinventing BBC radio to engage younger audiences with our world class content,” said Bob Shennan, director of BBC Radio and Music, in the announcement. “We’re working with established and new talent to produce shows which are informative and entertaining as only the BBC can be. The BBC has been challenged to generate more commercial income to supplement the licence fee and this new deal will contribute to that.”
To be clear, the BBC will remain ad-free in the United Kingdom, where it’s supported by the aforementioned license fee. Adams said one of the things Acast could offer was the ability to make sure ads were only served outside the U.K. (and to account for edge cases like U.K. military bases in other countries).
Adams said Acast will also be providing the BBC with new data about how the podcasts are performing.
“We give them the data and the dashboard to start really doubling down and focusing on podcasting as a medium,” he said.
According the announcement, this will apply to all BBC podcasts outside the U.K. (subject to rights restrictions), including Global News, The Assassination, World Business Report and Radio 4’s In Our Time. Most podcasts will have a single 30-second ad at the beginning, then another at the end.
Powered by WPeMatico
Crypto author Paul Vigna talks about the future of token sales
Paul Vigna, along with his writing partner Michael Casey, are crypto gurus. A crypto critic and Wall Street Journal reporter, Vigna sees through the hype and looks for the value inherent in the crypto system. Vigna and I spoke during this, the 100th episode of Technotopia. Vigna has a lot to say about the market and feels that his new book, the Truth Machine, picks up where his and… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
As tech automates, Blinkist keeps its book summary service very human
When I first heard of Blinkist, a service that breaks down recent nonfiction books to easily digestible snippets, I was afraid it would turn out to be some machine-learning-driven auto-summary thing. But in talking to co-founder Niklas Jansen, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the company is still very much people-powered — and in fact, that may be the root of its continuing success. Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Unbound’s Polly Rodriguez talks about the future of sexuality
Unbound is a self-described sextech webshop for rebellious women, and its founder, Polly Rodriguez, is a unique and fascinating representative for the site. In this Technotopia podcast I talk to Rodriguez about the future of sex toys and why sex robots probably won’t win us over. It’s refreshing to hear someone like Rodriguez talk about the future of human-to-human content and what… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
ScanMyPhoto’s Mitch Goldstone talks about the ephemerality of media
In this episode of Technotopia I talk with Mitch Goldstone, the founder of ScanMyPhotos. Mitch started his company with a mission to scan the millions of photos that clog our dresser drawers and closets and he is now scanning hundreds of thousands of photos a day. During the recent California wild fires Goldstone and his team worked tirelessly to help homeowners who lost their photos and… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
The TechCrunch Podcast: Augmented reality’s promise
Welcome back to the TechCrunch Podcast, where we take a deeper dive into the hottest topics coming down tech’s pike. In this episode, Founders Fund partner Cyan Banister and Super Ventures managing partner Matt Miesnieks joined TechCrunch editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino to talk the past, present and future of augmented reality. Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
For the third installment of this season’s Founder’s Corner podcast, I sat down with Jessie Woolley-Wilson, the inspiring edtech leader who is transforming the way students learn with DreamBox Learning.