wireless earbuds
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Extra Crunch roundup: Video pitch decks, Didi’s regulatory struggles, Nothing CEO interview
The numbers don’t lie.
According to DocSend, the average pitch deck is reviewed for just three minutes. And if you think a senior VC is studying the presentation your team crafted for months as if it were a Fabergé egg — well, you might be disappointed.
Even if you are lucky enough to land a meeting, it’s more likely that a junior person went through your pitch and ran it up the chain.
“The biggest lie in venture capital is: ‘Yes, I read through your deck,’” says Evan Fisher, founder of Unicorn Capital and Minimal Capital.
“Because those words are immediately followed by, ‘ … but why don’t you run us through it from the beginning?’”
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According to Fisher, the pro forma pitch deck is a thing of the past. Instead, the founders he’s worked with who made video pitches netted two to five times as many investor meetings as people who sent traditional pitch decks.
They also received up to five times more in terms of investor commitments from the first 20 meetings.
“Even if the only benefit was that other investment committee members heard the story direct from the founder, that alone would make your video pitch worth it,” says Fisher.
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Nothing founder Carl Pei on Ear (1) and building a hardware startup from scratch
Image Credits: TechCrunch
In an exclusive interview with Hardware Editor Brian Heater, Nothing Founder Carl Pei discussed the product and design principles underpinning Ear (1), a set of US$99/€99/£99 wireless earbuds that will hit the market later this month.
“We’re starting with smart devices,” said Pei. “Ear (1) is our is our first device. I think it has good potential to gain some traction.”
Despite Apple’s market share and the number of players already competing in the space, “we’ve just focused on being ourselves,” said Nothing’s founder, who also shared initial marketing plans and discussed the inherent tensions involved with manufacturing consumer hardware.
“Everything is a trade-off. Like if you pursue this design, that has a ton of implications. Battery life has ton of implications on size and on cost. The materials you use have implications on cost. Everything has an implication on timeline. It’s like 4D chess in terms of trade-offs.”
Will Didi’s regulatory problems make it harder for Chinese startups to go public in the US?
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Last week, just days after its U.S. IPO, cybersecurity regulators in China banned ride-hailing company Didi from onboarding new members.
Over the weekend, authorities called for Didi to be removed from several app stores due to “serious violations of laws and regulations in collecting and using personal information.”
The move suggests that China’s government “is willing to sacrifice business results for control,” writes Alex Wilhelm in this morning’s edition of The Exchange.
“For China-based companies hoping to list in the United States, the market likely just got much, much colder.”
79% more leads without more traffic: Here’s how we did it
Image Credits: Peter Dazeley (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
Jasper Kuria, the managing partner of CRO consultancy The Conversion Wizards, walks through an A/B test showing how research-driven CRO (conversion rate optimization) techniques led to a 79% increase in conversion rates for China Expat Health, a lead-generation company.
“Using research-based CRO principles to optimize a landing page for PPC (pay per click) traffic produced a 79% conversion lift, dramatically reducing the cost per lead for the company,” Kuria writes.
“They could then afford to bid more per click, which increased their overall monthly leads. CRO can have this kind of transformative effect on your business.”
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Razer targets gamers with low latency wireless earbuds
Everyone’s in the wireless earbuds business these days. Razer, never one to be left out of a trend, is entering the category this week with Hammerhead True Wireless, a pair of fully wireless earbuds targeting its core demographic of gamers.
Where the headphones set to distinguish themselves from the chattering masses of competitors is a focus on low latency. Anyone who’s ever attempted to use earbuds for gaming purposes knows that lag is an issue with a majority of the products on the market. Understandably so, as most are far more focused on music playback and therefore prioritize other features instead.
To achieve this, the company has tweaked Bluetooth 5.0 to offer a Gaming Mode with 60ms, according to the company’s numbers. What’s more, Razer’s offering them up at an extremely reasonable $100, less than even Amazon’s new Echo Buds — not to mention Apple’s pricey AirPods Pro, which were announced earlier this week.
On paper, at least, the specs are solid for the price point, including a decent (but far from exceptional) three hours of battery life on the buds, for 15 total hours with the charging case factored in. The headphones also feature the standard array of touch controls for playing and pausing music. Honestly, aside from gaming mode, they’re an otherwise pretty standard pair of earbuds from the looks of it.
The Hammerheads are available now through Razer’s site.
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Amazon reportedly readying its Alexa-powered answer to AirPods
Amazon is ready to challenge Apple with a cheaper, Alexa-powered set of wireless earbuds. If successful, it would carve out a space for the popular digital assistant, and its deep connections to the rest of Amazon’s ecosystem, in the mobile world Amazon has hitherto largely failed to penetrate. But that’s a big if.
A report from Bloomberg details the upcoming hardware, which sounds a lot like AirPods (and the handful of other wireless sets that have appeared): a pair of small wireless in-ear buds, a case that doubles as a charger and built-in controls and a mic so you can control your music, talk to friends and ask Alexa things on the go.
Of course, the obvious question is how exactly this will work, given that AirPods have special privileges as first-party Apple hardware that let them perform tasks others can’t yet do. If your phone is locked, non-AirPod headphones (for instance Galaxy Buds) can’t connect through their associated app to look stuff up or provide services. You can of course set up a “Hey Siri, OK Google” situation, but that’s a bit sad.
Bloomberg’s report says that the Alexa headphones let you “order goods, access music, weather and other information,” but it isn’t clear under what circumstances. If you have to have the phone unlocked and an app open for it to work, the whole thing is a non-starter. And it seems unlikely that Apple would grant Amazon some kind of clearance to do the kind of things only AirPods can do.
It’s conceivable that the headphones will, when possible, connect instead on detection of a command to a compatible Alexa device nearby with an internet connection — and there’s no shortage of those in many a tech-savvy home. But if you’re walking down the street and need to ask directions, you may have to pull the phone out, which rather negates the already somewhat limited convenience of owning a pair of wireless headphones.
These difficulties, plus those associated with simply making such a sophisticated piece of hardware for relatively cheap, explain why the headphones have reportedly had a bit of trouble getting shipped.
A cheaper price tag and potentially better audio quality may not be enough to make this particular endeavor a winner, but we’ll know more if and when Amazon goes official.
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B&O’s Beoplay E8 totally wireless earbuds really are the total package
Bang & Olufsen’s headphones tend to stand out from the crowd, and their new fully wireless mode, the Beoplay E8, is no exception. The E8 is easily the best totally wire-free headphone I’ve used thus far, with comfortable earbuds that should fit regardless of your ear shape, good battery life of around four hours per charge and the best sound quality of any true wireless buds… Read More
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