Teleconferencing
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Cosmos Video — a ‘Club Penguin for adults’ to socialise and work — raises $2.6M from LocalGlobe
All over the world startups are piling into the space marked “virtual interaction and collaboration”. What if a startup created a sort of “Club Penguin for adults”?
Step forward Cosmos Video, which has a virtual venues platform that allows people to work, hang out and socialize together. It has now raised $2.6 million in seed funding from LocalGlobe, with participation from Entrepreneur First, Andy Chung and Philipp Moehring (AngelList), and Omid Ashtari (former president of Citymapper).
Founders Rahul Goyal and Karan Baweja previously led product teams at Citymapper and TransferWise, respectively.
Cosmos allows users to create virtual venues by combining game mechanics with video chat. The idea is to bring back the kinds of serendipitous interactions we used to have in the real world. You choose an avatar, then meet up with their colleagues or friends inside a browser-based game. As you move your avatars closer to another person you can video chat with them, as you might in real life.
The competition is the incumbent video conferencing platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but calls on these platforms have a set agenda, and are timeboxed — they’re rigid and repetitive. On Cosmos you sit on the screen and consume one video call after another as you move around the space, so it is mimicking serendipity, after a fashion.
As well as having a social application, office colleagues can work collaboratively on tools such as whiteboards, Google documents and Figma, play virtual board games or gather around a table to chat.
Cosmos is currently being used in private beta by a select group of companies to host their offices and for social events such as Christmas parties. Others are using it to host events, meetup groups and family gatherings.
Co-founder Rahul Goyal said in a statement: “Once the pandemic hit, we both saw productivity surge in our respective teams but at the same time, people were missing the in-office culture. Video conferencing platforms provide a great service when it comes to meetings, but they lack spontaneity. Cosmos is a way to bring back that human connection we lack when we spend all day online, by providing a virtual world where you can play a game of trivia or pong after work with colleagues or gather round a table to celebrate a friend’s birthday.”
George Henry, partner at LocalGlobe, said: “We were really impressed with the vision and potential of Cosmos. Scaling live experiences online is one of the big internet frontiers where there are still so many opportunities. Now that the video infrastructure is in place, we believe products like Cosmos will enable new forms of live online experiences.”
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Woven adds to its calendar app’s $20/mo premium plan
Productivity software has had a huge couple of years, yet for all of the great note-taking apps that have launched, consumers haven’t gotten a lot of quality options for Google Calendar replacements.
This week, Woven, a calendar startup founded by former Facebook CIO Tim Campos, is shaking up the premium tier of their scheduling software, hoping that productivity-focused users will pay to further optimize the calendar experience just as they have paid for subscription email services like Superhuman and note-taking apps like Notion.
There’s been a pretty huge influx of investor dollars into the productivity space, which has shown a lot of promise in bottoms-up scaling inside enterprises by first aiming to sell their products to individuals. Woven has raised about $5 million to date, with investments from Battery Ventures, Felicis Ventures and Tiny Capital, among others.
“Time is the most valuable asset that we have,” Campos told TechCrunch. “We think there’s a real opportunity to do much more with the calendar.”
Their new product will help determine just how much demand there is for a pro-tier calendar that aims to make life easier for professionals than Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar cares to. The new product, which is $20 per month ($10 during an early access period if you pay for a year), builds on the company’s free tier product giving users a handful of new features. There’s still quite a bit of functionality in the free tier still, which is sticking around, but the lack of multi-account support is one of the big limitations there.
Image Credits: via Woven.
The core of Woven’s value is likely its Calendly-like scheduling links, which allow single users to quickly show when they’re free, or give teams the ability to eliminate back-and-forth entirely when scheduling meetings by scanning everyone’s availability and suggesting times that are uniformly available. In this latest update, the startup has also launched a new feature called Open Invite, which allows users to blast out links to join webinars that recipients can quickly register to attend.
One of Woven’s top features is probably Smart Templates, which aims to learn from your habits and strip down the amount of time it takes to organize a meeting. Selecting the template can automatically set you up with a one-time Zoom link, ping participants for their availability with Woven’s scheduling links and take care of mundane details. Now, the titles automatically update depending on participants, location or company information. While plenty of productivity happens on the desktop, the startup is trying to push the envelope on mobile as well. They’ve added an iMessage integration to quickly allow people to share their availability and schedule meetings inside chat.
The product updates arrive soon after the announcement of the company’s Zoom “Zapp,” which shoves the app’s functionality inside Zoom and will likely be a big sell to new users.
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Sidekick embraces remote working with always-on teleconferencing hardware
Those forced to acclimate to remote work understand what a pain it can be. Sure, there are certainly benefits to not having to commute into work each day, but among other things, you lose a lot when you eliminate human interaction. Apps like Zoom and Slack have their place, certainly, but none does a particularly good job replicating the in-person work environment.
Formed by three ex-Palantir employees and a former Googler, Y Combinator-backed Sidekick has impeccable timing. The startup (which is fittingly remotely split between the Bay Area and New York), has built a hardware solution designed to bring an always-on video connection to the desk of remote workers (which, as it so happens, is most of us non-essentials, these days).
Development of the project began in earnest when the startup set out interviewing 100+ teams to discuss the challenges of remote work.
“We reflected deeply on what’s needed to enable these organic conversations. We came from a background as ICs and managers working on distributed teams at Palantir and Google, where we had all the shiniest collaboration tools at our disposal — Slack, Zoom, Notion, Tandem,” Sidekick writes in a recent blog post. “Despite this entire suite of shiny tools, we would still fly out for a week every month from our home office in NYC to join our remote halves in London — over 20 hours in travel and thousands of dollars in expenses every month.”
Image Credits: Sidekick
Sidekick contends that teleconferencing apps like Zoom create too much friction between the user and creating a kind of virtual open office. The teams the company spoke with suggested that a dedicated hardware device was the way to go here, so Sidekick repurposed an OEMed tablet, forking Android to their purpose. The company’s roadmap involves a proprietary hardware device sporting key aspects like a depth sensor.
For now, however, it’s selling its version of the existing consumer tablet through a hardware-as-a-service plan. Customers will be charged $50 per month, per device.
“They should only pay us as long as we’re delivering that value, and stop paying us if we’re not,” Sidekick told TechCrunch when asked about the subscription method. “We see the hardware as the best way of delivering that, but we believe that what’s most fair is for our users to pay for exactly the continued value we provide — not the hardware itself.”
There’s a physical button that puts the system to sleep, but when it’s on, it’s on. Users can’t turn the camera off and remain in stealth, either. Personally, I’d be hesitant to have an always-on camera sitting in my living room (small, one bedroom New York apartment) with a direct line to my co-workers. One of the things you risk working from home is getting a little too…comfortable, if you will. After a few hours of not interacting, it’s easy to forget that there’s a camera trained on you.
The startup tells TechCrunch that the system isn’t for everyone. “Sidekick is meant for fast-moving teams, often forced into remote work, that truly need to be in the same room to make progress,” the company explains. “Teams like startup founding teams, product leadership, executives/chief-of-staffs and sales.”
There’s probably something to be said for the executives themselves who are looking for an easier way to keep tabs on employees now that they can’t just swing by their cubicle. Sidekick has a purchasing option “for teams of all sizes and setups,” though hopefully the product remains more about collaboration and less about monitoring for most teams.
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These best practices maximize the value of your online events
Jonathan Greechan is co-founder of the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator, Founder Institute, has run over 100 webinars including 100,000+ live attendees, and is one of Meetup’s most active organizers.
Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting calendars — along with travel budgets and marketing plans — by canceling events ranging from major league sports to tech conferences. This has impacted the startup and tech industries on all levels; by early March, economic losses from tech event cancellations alone amounted to more than $1.1 billion.
In response, many businesses have taken events online. Teleconferencing tools are being used more than ever, and Zoom registered 200 million daily users in March, up from a record of 10 million. Business figures and organizations can harness these online tools to minimize the blow of the worldwide shutdown, reach their target audiences and position themselves as thought leaders, but moving events online has its own problems.
The more meetups are generated, the more likely it is that yours will get lost in a sea of options. It’s also significantly easier for people to “attend” an event — and ignore it or exit early. There are plenty of studies demonstrating that internet users have shorter attention spans.
So you have to stand out and keep people engaged while speaking to people through a screen thousands of miles away. Over the past decade I have run more than 100 webinars with over 100,000 live attendees, and am one of the largest Meetup organizers in the world. Through trial and error I have developed a set of best practices that will keep people engaged in online events.
Transmitting real value by computer is certainly more challenging than face-to-face, but following these three pointers will help you get there.
1. Prepare for all eventualities
We all know what a badly prepared organized meeting looks like: frozen screens, buffering videos and broken audio.
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Verizon is buying B2B videoconferencing firm BlueJeans
US carrier Verizon* has splashed out to buy veteran B2B videoconferencing platform, BlueJeans Network — shelling out less than $500 million on the acquisition, according to the Wall Street Journal which first reported the news.
A Verizon spokeswoman confirmed to TechCrunch that the price-tag is sub-$500M but did not provide a more exact figure. Videoconferencing platform Blue Jeans has raised ~$175M since being founded around a decade ago, per Crunchbase, with US investor NEA leading a Series E round back in 2015.
In a press release announcing the deal, Verizon said it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the enterprise-grade videoconferencing and event platform in order to expand its “immersive unified communications portfolio”.
“Customers will benefit from a BlueJeans enterprise-grade video experience on Verizon’s high-performance global networks. In addition, the platform will be deeply integrated into Verizon’s 5G product roadmap, providing secure and real-time engagement solutions for high growth areas such as telemedicine, distance learning and field service work,” it wrote.
“As the way we work continues to change, it is absolutely critical for businesses and public sector customers to have access to a comprehensive suite of offerings that are enterprise ready, secure, frictionless and that integrate with existing tools,” added Tami Erwin, CEO of Verizon Business, in a supporting statement. “Collaboration and communications have become top of the agenda for businesses of all sizes and in all sectors in recent months. We are excited to combine the power of BlueJeans’ video platform with Verizon Business’ connectivity networks, platforms and solutions to meet our customers’ needs.”
The acquisition comes at a time when videoconferencing is seeing a massive uptick in usage as white collar workers around the world log on to meetings from home during the coronavirus pandemic.
Although it’s BlueJeans’ rival, Zoom, that’s been the most high profile name linked to the viral videoconferencing boom in recent weeks. The latter recently revealed that daily meeting participants on its platform jumped from a modest 10M in December to 200M in March.
However such booming growth and consumer usage has brought increased scrutiny for Zoom — leading to a spate of warnings (and even some bans), related to security and privacy concerns. And earlier this month the company said it would freeze product dev to focus on the laundry list of issues that have surfaced as users have piled in and kicked its tires, taking a little of the shine off of surging growth.
On the sheer usage front BlueJeans is certainly small fish in comparison to Zoom — having remained b2b focused. A BlueJeans spokeswoman told us it has more than $100M ARR and over 15,000 customers at this point. (Some notable users include Facebook and Disney.)
But it’s paying users that are likely of most interest to Verizon, hence talk of telemedicine, distance learning and field service work — areas ripe for coronavirus-accelerated digitization. Carriers generally, meanwhile, haven’t been able to translate increased usage during the pandemic into a revenue growth story — as a result of a combination of fixed costs, debt and market disruption that’s been hitting their shares during the coronavirus crisis, per Reuters. Bolting on more b2b tools looks to be one way of growing network revenues.
“The combination of BlueJeans’ world class enterprise video collaboration platform and trusted brand with Verizon Business’ next generation edge computing innovation will deliver highly differentiated and compelling solutions to our joint customers,” said Quentin Gallivan, BlueJeans CEO, in a statement. “We are very excited about joining the Verizon team and we truly believe the future of business communications starts today!”
Verizon said today that said BlueJeans founders and “key management” will join the company as part of the acquisition, with BlueJeans employees set to become Verizon employees immediately following the close of the deal — which is expected in the second quarter, pending customary closing conditions.
BlueJeans co-founder Krish Ramakrishnan has a history of exits, selling a couple of his previous startups to networking giant Cisco — where he has also worked, in between spinning out his own companies.
*Disclosure: Verizon is also TechCrunch’s parent company
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StarLeaf takes $40M to keep growing its videoconferencing as a service business
UK teleconference company StarLeaf, which sells cloud-based video and conferencing services to businesses, has taken on its first external capital almost ten years after being founded, back in 2008. The $40 million round is co-led by Highland Europe and Grafton Capital. Read More
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