Month: April 2020

Facebook confirmed this week that it will be pulling down a number of posts promoting stay-at-home protests. CNN was the first to report the news, which finds the social media giant pulling down events in a variety of different states, including California, Nebraska and New Jersey.

The news follows a spike in events across the country, as people have gathered to protest stay-at-home orders issued to combat the spread of COVID-19. Facebook confirmed that it has begun pulling some protests, citing defiance of state guidelines.

A spokesperson for the site told TechCrunch, “Unless government prohibits the event during this time, we allow it to be organized on Facebook. For this same reason, events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook .”

The company’s actions will vary from location to location and event to event, determining whether they are in violation of specific guidance. A spokesperson told CNN they are working with state governments in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to determine whether to pull events. Among other determinations are whether protests call for social distancing among attendees where required. 

Pictures from protests have become some of the most defining imagery over the past week, as attendees risk their health and the health of others in hopes of returning to some sense of normalcy a month in. Kentucky, notably, has seen a record number of COVID-19 cases following local protests.

“They seem to be very responsible people to me,” President Trump said of protesters during a press conference Friday, “but they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Movie ticketing company Fandango has agreed to buy Walmart’s on-demand video streaming service, Vudu, for an undisclosed sum. The video service today reaches more than 100 million living room devices across the U.S., including smart TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles and other over-the-top streaming devices, as well as Windows 10 and Mac computers, and iOS and Android mobile devices.

To date, the Vudu app on mobile has been installed more than 14.5 million times.

As a part of the agreement, Vudu will continue to power Walmart’s digital movie and TV store on Walmart.com.

In addition, Walmart says Vudu customers will have uninterrupted access to their Vudu library. They’ll also continue to be able to use their Walmart login as well as their Walmart wallet to make purchases on Vudu, the retailer notes.

Details as to how Fandango will specifically leverage Vudu weren’t immediately disclosed, but the company today operates its four-year old movie streaming platform, FandangoNOW, which is an obvious integration point. The service has become a more essential business in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has shut down theaters, significantly impacting Fandango’s digital ticketing operations.

As a result, Fandango has put more efforts into its streaming business. For example, its stream of the newly released “Trolls World Tour,” which skipped its theatrical release due to COVID-19, was the most pre-ordered title in the streaming service’s history, the most-rented digital title on opening day and the best-selling rental during its first three days of digital release, according to Deadline.

Fandango says that Vudu will allow it to scale that side of its business. It also plans to make offers to the majority of the Vudu team, when the deal closes.

“For us, it’s a combination of scale for our on-demand streaming service and the addition of Vudu talent,” a Fandango spokesperson said. “Vudu has a strong brand presence and customer base. So right now, we’re focusing on making sure that during this transition Vudu customers are taken care of and likewise on the FandangoNOW side. Both businesses will exist for the time being,” they noted.

Rumors that Walmart was shopping Vudu have been reported for many months. In February, Walmart was said to be in discussions with Comcast, which could have leveraged the platform for its newly launched streaming service, Peacock.

Walmart’s interest in an online movie purchase and rental marketplace may have dwindled in recent months, as competition from other major players has ramped up: WarnerMedia is preparing HBO Max; NBCU just launched Peacock; and Apple TV+ and Disney+ are also live, and gaining traction. There’s even a mobile-only service (Quibi). Elsewhere, there’s been significant consolidation in TV and video, with Viacom and CBS’ merger completing in late 2019, with plans to beef up the CBS All Access streaming service. Viacom also purchased free service pluto.tv. And sports-focused streamer fuboTV just sold to FaceBank.

Meanwhile, Walmart’s original plans for Vudu to be something of a competitor to Amazon Prime’s video service never really panned out.

That said, Walmart had been recently working to release a slate of original content on Vudu alongside new shoppable ads, powered by technology from its joint venture with interactive content startup Eko. Its first original Vudu series, a reboot of “Mr. Mom,” debuted last September. It’s unclear at this time to what extent those plans will continue at Fandango.

Fandango couldn’t yet comment on what role Vudu’s adtech or original content plays in the deal, beyond noting that everything live on the platform today would be included in the acquisition.

“We will continue to invest in areas where we have the greatest strength and are in the best position to serve our customers today and in the future,” a Walmart spokesperson noted in a statement, referencing the sale. “Pickup and delivery are great examples of how we’ve invested to bring digital and physical capabilities together to better serve our customers, by offering more choice and convenience. We’re focused on serving customers through these type of omni-retail experiences and we’re actively prioritizing our investments to maximize our strengths and serve them in new ways,” they added.

Walmart has seen a surge of interest in its e-commerce operations as a result of the pandemic. The company’s focus now is on hiring to fulfill consumer demand for online shopping and grocery. It has already hired 150,000 new workers and is hiring another 50,000, it said last week.

The Fandango acquisition is expected to close in the months ahead, says Walmart.

Updated, 4/20/20 4:00 PM ET with Fandango comments. 

Source: Tech Crunch

Forget the calendar invite. Just jump into a conversation. That’s the idea powering a fresh batch of social startups poised to take advantage of our cleared schedules amidst quarantine. But they could also change the way we work and socialize long after COVID-19 by bringing the free-flowing, ad-hoc communication of parties and open office plans online. While “Live” has become synonymous with performative streaming, these new apps instead spread the limelight across several users as well as the task, game, or discussion at hand.

The most buzzy of these startups is Clubhouse, an audio-based social network where people can spontaneously jump into voice chat rooms together. You see the unlabeled rooms of all the people you follow, and you can join to talk or just listen along, milling around to find what interests you. High-energy rooms attract crowds while slower ones see participants slip out to join other chat circles.

Clubhouse blew up this weekend on VC Twitter as people scrambled for exclusive invites, humblebragged about their membership, or made fun of everyone’s FOMO. For now, there’s no public app or access. The name Clubhouse perfectly captures how people long to be part of the in-crowd.

Clubhouse was built by Paul Davison, who previously founded serendipitous offline people-meeting location app Highlight and reveal-your-whole-camera-roll app Shorts before his team was acquired by Pinterest in 2016. This year he debuted his Alpha Exploration Co startup studio and launched Talkshow for instantly broadcasting radio-style call-in shows. Spontaneity is the thread that ties Davison’s work together, whether its for making new friends, sharing your life, transmitting your thoughts, or having a discussion.

It’s very early days for Clubhouse. It doesn’t even have a website. Don’t confuse it with the similarly named Clubhouse.io. There’s no telling exactly what it will be like if or when it officially launches, and Davison and his co-founder Rohan Seth declined to comment. But the positive reception shows a desire for a more immediate, multi-media approach to discussion that updates what Twitter did with text.

Sheltered From Surprise

What quarantine has revealed is that when you separate everyone, spontaneity is a big thing you miss. In your office, that could be having a random watercooler chat with a co-worker or commenting aloud about something funny you found on the internet. At a party, it could be wandering up to chat with group of people because you know one of them or overhear something interesting. That’s lacking while we’re stuck home since we’ve stigmatized randomly phoning a friend, differing to asynchronous text despite its lack of urgency.

Scheduled Zoom calls, utilitarian Slack threads, and endless email chains don’t capture the thrill of surprise or the joy of conversation that giddily revs up as people riff off each other’s ideas. But smart app developers are also realizing that spontaneity doesn’t mean constantly interrupting people’s life or workflow. They give people the power to decide when they are or aren’t available or signal that they’re not to be disturbed so they’re only thrust into social connection when they want it.

Houseparty embodies this spontaneity. It’s become the breakout hit of quarantine by letting people on a whim join group video chat rooms with friends the second they open the app. It saw 50 million downloads in a month, up 70X over its pre-COVID levels in some places. It’s become the #1 social app in 82 countries including the US, and #1 overall in 16 countries.

Originally built for gaming, Discord lets communities spontaneously connect through persistent video, voice, and chat rooms. It’s seen a 50% increase in US daily voice users with spikes in shelter-in-place early adopter states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Washington. Bunch, for video chat overlayed on mobile gaming, is also climbing the charts and going mainstream with its user base shifting to become majority female as they talk for 1.5 million minutes per day. Both apps make it easy to join up with pals and pick something to play together.

The Impromptu Office

Enterprise video chat tools are adapting to spontaneity as an alternative to heavy-handed, pre-meditated Zoom calls. There’s been a backlash as people realize they don’t get anything done by scheduling back-to-back video chats all day.

• Loom lets you quickly record and send a video clip to co-workers that they can watch at their leisure, with back-and-forth conversation sped up because videos are uploaded as they’re shot.

• Around overlays small circular video windows atop your screen so you can instantly communicate with colleagues while most of your desktop stays focused on your actual work.

• Screen exists as a tiny widget that can launch a collaborative screenshare where everyone gets a cursor to control the shared window so they can improvisationally code, design, write, and annotate.

• Pragli is an avatar-based virtual office where you can see if someone’s in a calendar meeting, away, or in flow listening to music so you know when to instantly open a voice or video chat channel together without having to purposefully find a time everyone’s free. But instead of following you home like Slack, Pragli lets you sign in and out of the virtual office to start and end your day.

Raising Our Voice

While visual communication has been the breakout feature of our mobile phones by allowing us to show where we are, shelter-in-place means we don’t have much to show. That’s expanded the opportunity for tools that take a less-is-more approach to spontaneous communication. Whether for remote partying or rapid problem solving, new apps beyond Clubhouse are incorporating voice rather than just video. Voice offers a way to rapidly exchange information and feel present together without dominating our workspace or attention, or forcing people into an uncomfortable spotlight.

High Fidelity is Second Life co-founder Philip Rosedale’s $72 million-funded current startup. After recently pivoting away from building a virtual reality co-working tool, High Fidelity has begun testing a voice and headphones-based online event platform and gathering place. The early beta lets users move their dot around a map and hear the voice of anyone close to them with spatial audio so voices get louder as you get closer to someone, and shift between your ears as you move past them. You can spontaneously approach and depart little clusters of dots to explore different conversations within earshot.

High Fidelity is currently using a satellite photo of Burning Man as its test map. It allows DJs to set up in different corners, and listeners to stroll between them or walk off with a friend to chat, similar to the real offline event. Since Burning Man was cancelled this year, High Fidelity could potentially be a candidate for holding the scheduled virtual version the organizers have promised.

Houseparty’s former CEO Ben Rubin and Skype GM of engineering Brian Meek are building a spontaneous teamwork tool called Slashtalk. While Rubin left, Houseparty sold to Fortnite-maker Epic in mid-2019, but the gaming giant largely neglected the app until its recent quarantine-driven success.

His new startup’s site explains that “/talk is an anti-meeting tool for fast, decentralized conversations. We believe most meetings can be eliminated if the right people are connected at the right time to discuss the right topics, for just as long as necessary.” It lets people quickly jump into a voice or video chat to get something sorted without delaying until a calendared collab session.

Whether for work or play, these spontaneous apps can conjure times from our more unstructured youth. Whether sifting through the cafeteria or school yard, seeing who else is at the mall, walking through halls of open doors in college dorms, or hanging at the student union or campus square, the pre-adult years offer many opportunities for impromptu social interation.

As we age and move into our separate homes, we literally erect walls that limit our ability to perceive the social cues that signal that someone’s available for unprompted communication. That’s spawned apps like Down To Lunch and Snapchat acquisition Zenly, and Facebook’s upcoming Messenger status feature designed to break through those barriers and make it feel less desperate to ask someone to hang out offline.

But while socializing or collaborating IRL requires transportation logistics and usually a plan, the new social apps discussed here bring us together instantly, thereby eliminating the need to schedule togetherness ahead of time. Gone too are the geographic limits restraining you to connect only with those within a reasonable commute. Digitally, you can pick from your whole network. And quarantines have further opened our options by emptying parts of our calendars.

Absent those frictions, what shines through is our intention. We can connect with who we want and accomplish what we want. Spontaneous apps open the channel so our impulsive human nature can shine through.

For more of this author Josh Constine’s product analysis, subscribe to his newsletter Moving Product

Source: Tech Crunch

Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have teamed up to launch their first product together since leaving the Facebook mothership. Rt.live is an up-to-date tracker of how fast COVID-19 is spreading in each state.

“Rt” measures the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. The higher above the number 1, the faster COVID-19 races through a population, while a number below one shows the virus receding. For example, Rt.live displays that Georgia has the highest, most dangerous Rt score of 1.5 while New York is down to 0.54 thanks to aggressive shelter-in-place orders.

Krieger tells me that “Kevin has been writing and publishing open-source data analysis notebooks on how to calculate Rt on a daily basis. We wanted to take that work and visualize it so anyone can see how their state is doing at curbing the spread.” Krieger had meanwhile been pitching in by building SaveOurFaves, a directory of local Bay Area restaurants that are selling gift cards so patrons can keep them afloat during quarantine. Built with his wife, the Kriegers open sourced it so people can build similar sites for their communities.

Rt.live shows that as of yesterday, Texas and California are at or just under 1 and Vermont has the best score at 0.33. The charts over time reveal how Washington and Georgia were successfully fighting COVID-19, dipping beneath 1 until the virus bounced back recently. Data is sourced from the COVID Tracking Project and you can examine Rt.live’s modeling system on GitHub.

“As states decide whether and how to open back up, they’ll have to manage their infection rate carefully, and we hope dashboards like rt.live will be helpful in doing so” Krieger says. By better illustrating how even small differences in shelter-in-place policy and compliance can exponentially change the severity of the impact of the virus, it could help convince people to stay inside. This kind of tool could also be helpful for determining where it’d be safe to reactivate some businesses, and quickly catch if virality is spiking and strict social distancing needs to be reinstated.

One fascinating feature of the site is the ability to filter by region so you can see how the Western states are doing better at suppressing COVID-19 than those in the South. You can also view the states with no shelter-in-place orders to see they’re doing worse on average. The charts could help identify how different political orientations and their subsequent policies translate to infection outcomes.

It might seem out of character for the photo app moguls to be building a medical statistics site. But Systrom has long studied virality as part of his work that helped Instagram grow so fast. He began publishing his own statistical models for tracking coronavirus infections and deaths on March 19th. “We’d been talking about ways of working together and this came out of that — my first job out of school was actually doing data visualizations / analysis at Meebo so a blast from the past in more ways than one” Krieger tells me. While Systrom did the data analysis, Krieger built the site, mirroring their old front-end and back-end Instagram roles.

“We built Rt.live because we believe Rt — the effective infection rate — is one of the best ways to understand how COVID is spreading” Kreiger explains. “It was great to work together again — we were able to take it from idea to launch in just a few days because of all our history & shared context.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Cities around the world have become home this decade to distributed tech teams and homegrown startup successes. Each of these additional layers of experience and specialization help to make each local community stronger, like what began happening in Silicon Valley many decades ago.

Now layoffs are striking deep into these fragile, complex ecosystems.

Yes, companies in San Francisco and other tech metros are seeing big cuts, as you can read all about on TechCrunch this week. But the satellite offices also seem to be taking big hits, as Natasha Mascarenhas covered. Data from Layoffs.fyi shows thousands of jobs bleeding out in places like Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Louisville to name a few.

The immediate reason this is particularly bad is that tech jobs have a multiplier on jobs in other local industries, particularly where there aren’t that many tech jobs. But the bigger long-term risk is that people who might be starting the next company in your city don’t get the hands-on experience and the connections locally and globally that come distributed teams. How long will it take many of the hubs that were going strong just a couple months ago to recover now?

Of course, the even bigger opposing trend is remote work now that everyone is doing it. Will the future founder who was going to move to San Francisco for networking purposes just stay in Louisville, and have a local HQ or just keep it remote-first? Will we still need all that commercial real estate in the Bay Area, actually?

TechCrunch is covering the downs-and-ups of startup hubs during the pandemic (see Extra Crunch for more on Salt Lake City this week, actually). Want to talk about what your city is doing to keep its startup scene strong? Email me at eldon@techcrunch.com and let’s discuss.

Investors rethink consumer and edtech investing

For our first investor survey this week, Josh Constine and Arman Tabatabai talked to 17 top social investors about the impact of COVID-19 on the category. Here’s Wayne Hu of SignalFire, excerpted from the full article on Extra Crunch.

There are, however, other social trends that were already picking up steam before COVID-19 that may further accelerate now. Many of these may be newer behaviors that sound dumb or are hard to explain, but ultimately provide value. Peloton sounded silly to many before they became popular, and there are several other companies now bridging the gap between consumers, trainers and fellow participants to bring the in-person social phenomenon of spin cycle and fitness boutiques into the living room. Tempo, a SignalFire portfolio company, is the first to offer high-intensity strength training complete with weights in the home. Beyond the convenience, 3D sensors automatically track reps and weights and users also receive targeted feedback on form from world-class trainers aided by real-time motion tracking — something that would be too expensive for most consumers otherwise. Coronavirus will be a catalyst for many to experience this and other accelerating trends for the first time.

EC members, don’t miss their social overview survey last week.

Next, Natasha and Arman talked to leading edtech investors for Extra Crunch about how the new coronavirus is impacting their companies. Many startups in the category have suddenly had much brighter futures — with some new challenges. Here’s Tetyana Astashkina of Learn Launch:

A lot of our companies across all segments are offering their products for free. User (teacher) training has always been key to successful product adoption. All of the training happens online now which is new and needs adjustment. Also, the timelines to respond to customer inquiries are very compressed which puts pressure on companies, especially because of eternally limited resources.

K-12 districts need to have budgets in place by the end of June for the next school year. So selling, while giving the product away for free and while supporting un-trained users is going to be a scramble. Now imagine being a cash-starved start-up trying to deal with your own homeschooling needs…

The latest venture shifts in the COVID-19 era

Many VCs continue to say they are open for biz while others say they are ‘focused on helping portfolio companies.’ So here’s what we’re seeing on the fundraising front this week.

First, leading seed-stage VC Y Combinator has scaled down its pro-rata program of recent years. It had taken a 7% stake in every company that has raised a priced seed or Series A round since it began the policy in 2015, totaling hundreds of rounds in hundreds of companies.

But it has also expanded its class size dramatically in recent years. Eventually, as described by CEO Michael Seibel, in a memo to companies this week obtained by Jon Shieber for TechCrunch, it couldn’t do both. So starting next month, it will be doing pro-rata for YC companies on a case-by-case basis and at a flat 4%. 

This change likely would have happened anyway, but it happens right when more startups than ever are looking for sources of cash.

Overall, seed money appears to continue to be in sharp decline — a trend that had already accelerated before the pandemic, Alex Wilhem detailed on Extra Crunch.

The mortality rate continues to increase across the board, too. When investors give up on selling a company, they send them to Sherwood Partners, a “restructuring firm” that acts as a sort of startup undertaker (mainly selling off the IP and other parts). In an interview with Connie Loizos for Extra Crunch this week, founder Marty Pichinson says they are winding down two to three companies per day, up from two to four per week a few years ago. “We’re in companies that raised $10 million to $25 million, to companies that raised up to $1.5 billion,” he told her. “It doesn’t matter what size they are; when they come to us, they’re all broke. If we’re closing it down to clean up and monetize what we can, they are basically in the same position, whether they raised $20 million or they were once a billion-dollar business.”

Across the week

TechCrunch

Tech for good during COVID-19: Pivots and partnerships to help people deal

This venture firm is offering fast funding in a time of uncertainty

How I Podcast: First Draft and Track Changes’ Sarah Enni

Extra Crunch

As COVID-19 pummels global economy, 8 new companies join the $100M ARR club

Punitive liquidation preferences return to VC — don’t do it

Traditional sales and marketing strategies won’t see you through this crisis

How Adobe shifted a Las Vegas conference to executives’ living rooms in less than 30 days

Dear Sophie: How do I extend my visa status without leaving the US?

#EquityPod

From Alex:

Turning to the show, as has been the case every single week since we cannot recall when, we had a hell of a packed agenda.; there were new funds to talk about, there were rounds aplenty. As the unicorn era hands the baton to the COVID-19 downturn, there still more than we can get through each week.

But we did manage all that follows:

• Lightspeed raised a host of new funds worth billions of dollars, including $1.83 billion in capital for later-stage deals and $1.5 billion to pour more capital into its international investments.
• Andreessen Horowitz wants to put together a second crypto-focused fund worth $450 million. That’s more than last time, and we had questions.
• Corigin Ventures raised its first institutional fund at $36 million, effectively stepping out of complete control from its parent organization, Corigin Real Estate.
• Stripe raised $600 million more, at a flat valuation to its preceding round. The payments company is now worth around $36 billion. The news dropped out of nowhere, and probably means that the eventual Stripe IPO is far, far away.
• Robinhood is raising new capital, which caught our eye.
• Carta, which helps manage equity for startups, laid off 16 percent of its staff as detailed in an emotional memo by the company’s CEO Henry Ward. Then, the plot thickened when news broke that it’s raising a new round of funding that would value it at $3 billion.
• Lucid and Everee, two Utah-based companies raised capital this week, right after we saw Podium raise the week before. $52 million for Lucid, makers of Lucidchart, and $10 million fo Everee, a payroll software startup with a fun twist.
• But we weren’t done yet, as we had to talk about Airbnb’s new debt work; Danny made the point that it’s hardly cheap capital for the firm to raise, possibly adding pressure to Airbnb later on. This is another company that will not go public in 2020.
• Savi raised $6 million to help students pay student loans, while Frank raised $5 million to help students avoid racking them up.
• Despite tight school budgets, Labster landed a deal with the California Community Colleges which tells us a bit about how edtech optimism is turning into actual dollars.

What we’re up to:

Extra Crunch Live: Join Aileen Lee, Ted Wang for Q&A on 4/20 at 10:30am PT/1:30pm ET

Apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2020

Extra Crunch members save money with Partner Perks and event discounts

Extra Crunch is now available in Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa

Source: Tech Crunch