The weekend has arrived and with it came a slew of terrific daily deals on so many popular products. Lucky for you, we dug through them all to come up with 10 in particular that shouldn't be missed. Highlights include 10-packs of the only FDA-authorized KN95 face masks on Amazon for $36.99 instead of $45 (they come with five free USA-made BNX A96 masks filter 99.2% of airborne particles, which is better than most 3M N95 masks!), Amazon's best-selling 3-ply face masks for just 29¢ each, the deepest discount on Purell hand sanitizer that we've seen since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the lowest price ever for AirPods Pro (just $199!), AirPods 2 with Wireless Charging Case for $5 less than Apple charges for entry-level AirPods 2, a massive Amazon kitchen sale with five pages of deals on all the kitchen gear you can imagine, a huge $130 discount on a renewed Arlo Ultra 4K home security camera system, best-selling Kasa Mini Wi-Fi Smart Plugs for just $7.50 each instead of $50 per 4-pack, a jaw-dropping $50 discount on the only smartphone-connected Instant Pot, and an $80 discount on a gorgeous 50-inch 4K Fire TV. See all of these awesome deals down below.
Epic Games is currently engaged in a heavily publicized legal battle with Apple over Fortnite, which is currently unavailable on iPhone, iPad, and Mac following Epic's App Store violations.
Epic now has to deal with a much bigger problem than the antitrust action against Apple. The US government is supposedly investigating how various US companies handle personal data security, Epic included.
Chinese conglomerate Tencent holds either majority or minority stakes in these companies, including a 40% stake in Epic.
Epic Games has started a battle that it knows it can't win -- at least not yet. The company quietly updated the Fortnite app for iPhone and iPad with code that enabled Epic's payments option for in-app purchases. Apple promptly banned the app, and Epic then unleashed a PR campaign against the iPhone maker while simultaneously suing Apple and Google on anticompetitive grounds.
In the days that followed, we learned that Apple went even further than banning the app, telling Epic that it would revoke its developer accounts for both Fortnite and the Unreal Engine. Epic tried to stop this with a temporary restraining order but lost the battle on Fortnite. The judge said those were self-inflicted wounds that Epic could fix on its own if it wanted to. But the verdict also noted that the Unreal Engine should not be affected. Epic continued its PR campaign, claiming Apple was solely at fault, and making it clear it would not budge. Apple revoked the Fortnite developer account without blinking, and now the game is unplayable on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. A new hearing in the case is scheduled for September 28th, and the fates of both Fortnite and Unreal are still in play.
It turns out that the Apple lawsuit isn't even Epic's most pressing problem right now. The company might have a bigger adversary than that in the form of the US government.
Now that iOS 14 is available to download on iPhone, Google announced a few useful new features for iPhone users that take advantage of the new mobile operating system.
Google's iPhone apps, including the Google app, Chrome, and Gmail, can benefit from two key iOS 14 features in the future which might help Google take over your iPhone screen.
Google now has a search widget for the home screen and encourages users to set Chrome and Gmail as default apps in iOS 14.
After three months of betas, iOS 14 is finally out for all iPhone users, and you can try all the novelties that Apple imagined for this year's major mobile OS upgrade for yourself. There are quite a few notable changes in iOS 14, including features that were only available on Android before. And it's thanks to those that Google thinks it can take over your iPhone home screen.
The iPhone remains a highly prized commodity for Google, which pays Apple handsomely for being the default search engine on Safari. But thanks to iOS 14's novel features, Google can be even more aggressive. It's all about taking over the home screen, a practice we've witnessed before from another tech giant.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an absolutely stunning image of Jupiter.
The image shows a multitude of storms and even the icy moon Europa hanging out in the background.
Jupiter's storms are going through significant changes, and scientists can't explain why.
The Hubble Space Telescope may be getting old, but it still manages to capture some of the most gorgeous images of the cosmos that mankind has ever laid eyes on. Now, it's set its powerful sights on Jupiter and the resulting image is, well, one of its best photos ever, and that's saying a lot.
The image has everything you'd want from a snapshot of our system's mighty gas giant. There's the Great Red Spot, the smaller white spot, an all-new storm that is new to scientists, the turbulent swirling gasses, and even a photobomb from Europa hanging out int he background. It's just plain perfect.
Some iPhone 12 price rumors claim the cheapest 5G iPhone will match the $699 iPhone 11, but newer reports say that’s not realistic.
An insider from China says the bill of materials for the iPhone 12 is nearly $50 higher compared to the iPhone 11 due to various hardware upgrades, including the 5G modem and OLED screen.
The first wave of 5G smartphones last year showed us that we’d have to pay extra to test the next-generation of mobile communication. A year later, smartphone vendors have started making more affordable 5G handsets, and 5G coverage has improved. But 5G phones are still expensive to make. Samsung proved that with the Galaxy S20 and Note 20 series, which lack affordable versions. Google is even said to have hamstrung the Pixel 5 because the Snapdragon 865 processor was too costly.
When it comes to the iPhone 12 series, most reports seem to be suggesting that the cheapest versions of the phone would be at least as affordable as the iPhone 11, despite featuring 5G connectivity. But a new leak from China indicates that Apple might not be able to afford to keep the entry-level price at $699.
In an interview airing with President Trump's favorite TV network this weekend, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates tells Fox News' Chris Wallace that Trump's travel bans earlier this year might have actually worsened the coronavirus pandemic.
That's because the bans created a rush from arriving travelers that the US wasn't prepared for from a coronavirus testing standpoint, for example.
President Trump repeatedly touts the implementation of the travel bans on the campaign trail as one of his administration's most impactful steps taken in response to the pandemic.
Given how hard the US has been hit so far during the coronavirus pandemic -- with more than 6.7 million cases having been recorded in the US, along with almost 200,000 deaths, per the team at Johns Hopkins University -- it's to be expected that his Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden is hitting President Trump hard and repeatedly on the campaign trail for the administration's response to the virus. Among the actions Trump officials took in response to the virus was the launch of Operation Warp Speed, which Trump himself highlights repeatedly as the kind of Manhattan Project-style marshaling of resources to bring a coronavirus vaccine to fruition as quickly as possible.
Another of the steps Trump approved in the early days of the pandemic is something else he touts often on the campaign trail -- his implementation of travel bans, shutting the US border to visitors from both China, where the COVID-19 virus originated, as well as Europe. Those bans saved lives, the president tells crowds over and over again -- while, in a new interview airing this weekend on the president's favorite TV network Fox News, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates counters that they may actually have had the opposite effect.
Google plans to announce a new Chromecast streaming device on September 30th.
Leaks of the device (codenamed "Sabrina") have been popping up for months, but the latest leaked renders appear to give us a look at Google's final design.
The remote for Google's new Chromecast has dedicated buttons for YouTube and Netflix.
While Apple, Amazon, and Roku were all releasing standalone streaming media players, Google was content with asking us to stick a dongle in our TV that could connect to the apps on our phone, tablet, or computer. Chromecast has always been an intriguing outlier, but recent leaks have revealed that Google is working on a media player that could finally rival the likes of the Apple TV and Fire TV, and we got our best look at it yet this week.
On Friday, WinFuture published a series of purported press renders that show off the new Chromecast (codenamed "Sabrina") and its remote. As expected, the device itself is similar in shape and in size to previous Chromecast HDMI dongles, though slightly larger and a bit more oblong. Other than that, it looks like a Chromecast, and shouldn't take up too much room behind or on the side of your TV. But what we're really interested in is the remote.
SpaceX was forced to delay the launch of yet another batch of Starlink satellites after rough seas were reported in the recovery area.
The company's drone ships are capable of dealing with turbulent seas, but the current was simply too strong this time.
A new launch date has yet to be announced.
SpaceX has had a busy year of launches, and many of them have included the company's own Starlink satellites. The satellites will eventually form a communications network around the Earth, but it's going to take a lot of them for the network to be as powerful as SpaceX wants it to be. This week was supposed to feature yet another Starlink launch but, as is sometimes the case, Mother Nature decided to shut things down.
The weather for the launch, which was slated to take place either September 17th or 18th, isn't actually all that bad. However, it's not just the weather at the launch site that SpaceX has to worry about, and since the seas where its drone ship would position itself to recover the Falcon 9 booster are rough, the whole thing has to be postponed.
The stampede from offices to working from home has strained IT security teams to their limits. As a result, SMBs find they need to get more bang for fewer bucks to fight off cybersecurity threats. However, even IT departments with limited resources can implement foundational strategies to address network security issues, and lay the groundwork for future investments.
Apple pulled the wraps off two new Apple Watches, two iPads and several services bundles at an event Tuesday held online. The new watches include the Series 6, which boasts performance improvements over the previous generation of the product, and the SE, an economy watch model. Apple also refreshed its basic iPad and the iPad Air, which is now based on the new A14 processor, a five-nanometer fabricated powerhouse.
Computer systems design and related services added 13,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's August jobs report. IT employment in July was up by more than 203,000 positions since the COVID-19 outbreak; and there were more than 235,000 job postings by U.S. employers, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association.
Robocalls, spam and call spoofing have all but destroyed Americans' trust in telephone calls -- to the point that many individuals have essentially stopped answering the phone.
Here are seven steps that organizations can take to combat erroneous call blocking and increase answer rates. These measures will help businesses optimize contact operations, increase call performance, and protect and promote their brands by restoring trust in calls.
Automated purchasing bots, also known as "sneaker bots," "click bots," "Instacart bots" and other names, are ruining the online shopping and gig economy experience for both consumers and workers. These bots can cause considerable damage to a mobile business' reputation and bottom line. There are a number of measures that e-tailers should take a to protect their mobile apps from sneaker bots.
A proposal to avoid the banning of the popular social media app TikTok was submitted to the U.S. Treasury Department over the weekend. The plan submitted by ByteDance, which owns TikTok, calls for the company to enlist Oracle as a "trusted technology provider" in order to address national security concerns raised about the video-sharing software by the Trump administration.
E-commerce is experiencing rapid growth with no sign of slowing down. Retailers and brands are finding that the new normal in retail and e-tail marketing is much like trying to hit a moving target. They have to take a refined aim and build in some lead time. This marketing strategy requires businesses to adjust their digital infrastructure and tactics. Otherwise, they will miss the target as consumers prepare for their holiday marketing and ad campaigns.
In case wringing your hands over the tax man weren’t enough, criminals are out there trying to swipe your hard-earned cash and personal information from right under your nose.
PARIS (AP) — Peppering the 8,000 pages of purported Central Intelligence Agency hacking data released Tuesday by WikiLeaks are reviews of some of the world's most popular anti-virus products.
The Windows 10 20H2 update will arrive next month with a few new features, like a visually refreshed Start menu, improved notifications, preinstalled Chromium Edge browser and the ability to Alt+Tab through Edge tabs. It’s also bringing more of the f...
The Unicode Consortium has unveiled a relatively minor emoji update that would still add 217 options to your selection next year. Emoji 13.1 comes with seven brand new images: a heart on fire, a heart with bandages, a woman with beard, a gender-neutr...
This weekend will see the running of the 88th 24 Hours of Le Mans race, but before that starts, the Porsche Carrera Cup Deutschland will run a 45-minute support race. During that event, while the race vehicles will be petrol burning Porsche 911 GT3 C...
You may not get a chance to physically travel anytime soon, but if you're Deezer subscriber, the music streaming service is giving you an alternative way to experience the music and culture of another country. The platform has introduced a country se...
Just a few hours ago it looked like the fight between NBCUniversal and Roku would get ugly, and even see the Comcast-owned network’s other channels disappear from streaming boxes and sticks. But now the two have patched things up, and announced that...
When the Department of Commerce said Friday that it would soon bar all new downloads of WeChat and TikTok from US App Stores, it marked the latest escalation in the weeks-long saga over TikTok’s future in America. The drama has been playing out since...
The saying goes, “the internet is forever.” Now, the Wayback Machine and Cloudflare are doing their part to strengthen that adage. The two are joining forces to ensure more web pages are archived, according to a post on the Internet Archive blog.The...
Unlike a lot of headphone companies, Sennheiser has taken a more measured approach to true wireless earbuds. Thus far, it has only introduced two models, with the second being an improved version of the first. Both of those Momentum True Wireless set...
DC Universe Streaming Service Will Become Universe Infinite Comics Platform DC Universe, which started out as a streaming service for original DC superhero content, will in January become DC Universe Infinite, a supersized subscription service for DC Comics. CNET reports: The service launches on Jan. 21 f
NASA To Film an Estee Lauder Ad In Space As the ISS Opens For Business NASA is preparing to oversee the largest push of business activity aboard the ISS. "Later this month, up to 10 bottles of a new Estee Lauder (EL) skincare serum will launch to the space station," reports CNN. "NASA astronauts are
Iranian Hackers Found Way Into Encrypted Apps, Researchers Say An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Iranian hackers, most likely employees or affiliates of the government, have been running a vast cyberespionage operation equipped with surveillance tools that can outsm
Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras Facebook is again being sued for allegedly spying on Instagram users, this time through the unauthorized use of their mobile phone cameras. Bloomberg reports: The lawsuit springs from media reports in July that the photo-sharing a
Bill Gates On the Difference Between Elon Musk and Steve Jobs In an interview with Bloomberg, Bill Gates was asked whether his contemporary Elon Musk could be considered the "next Steve Jobs," due to the advancements his companies Tesla and SpaceX have made in electric cars and reusable rock
Tesla Wins Lawsuit Against Whistleblower Accused of Hacks An anonymous reader writes: The US District Court of Nevada awarded Tesla a win in its lawsuit against a former employee, filed two years ago. You may recall CEO Elon Musk referred to this incident in a previously leaked email cal
Whoever said you can’t make money playing video games clearly hasn’t taken a look at Unity Software’s stock price.
On its first official day of trading, the company rose more than 31%, opening at $75 per share before closing the day at $68.35. Unity’s share price gains came after last night’s pricing of the company’s stock at $52 per share, well above the range of $44 to $48 which was itself an upward revision of the company’s initial target.
Games like “Pokémon GO” and “Iron Man VR” rely on the company’s software, as do untold numbers of other mobile gaming applications that use the company’s toolkit for support. The company’s customers range from small gaming publishers to large gaming giants like Electronic Arts, Niantic, Ubisoft and Tencent.
Unity’s IPO comes on the heels of other well-received debuts, including Sumo Logic, Snowflake and JFrog .
TechCrunch caught up with Unity’s CFO, Kim Jabal, after-hours today to dig in a bit on the transaction.
According to Jabal, hosting her company’s roadshow over Zoom had some advantages, as her team didn’t have to focus on tackling a single geography per day, allowing Unity to “optimize” its time based on who the company wanted to meet, instead, of say, whomever was free in Boston or Chicago on a particular Tuesday morning.
Jabal’s comments aren’t the first that TechCrunch has heard regarding roadshows going well in a digital format instead of as an in-person presentation. If the old-school roadshow survives, we’ll be surprised, though private jet companies will miss the business.
Talking about the transaction itself, Jabal stressed the connection between her company’s employees, value and their access to that same value. Unity’s IPO was unique in that existing and former employees were able to trade 15% of their vested holdings in the company on day one, excluding “current executive officers and directors,” per SEC filings.
That act does not seemed to have dampened enthusiasm for the company’s shares, and could have helped boost early float, allowing for the two sides of the supply and demand curves to more quickly meet close to the company’s real value, instead of a scarcity-driven, more artificial figure.
Regarding Unity’s IPO pricing, Jabal discussed what she called a “very data-driven process.” The result of that process was an IPO price that came in above its raised range, and still rose during its first day’s trading, but less than 50%. That’s about as good an outcome as you can hope for in an IPO.
One final thing for the SaaS nerds out there. Unity’s “dollar-based net expansion rate” went from very good to outstanding in 2020, or in the words of the S-1/A:
Our dollar-based net expansion rate, which measures expansion in existing customers’ revenue over a trailing 12-month period, grew from 124% as of December 31, 2018 to 133% as of December 31, 2019, and from 129% as of June 30, 2019 to 142% as of June 30, 2020, demonstrating the power of this strategy.
We had to ask. And the answer, per Jabal, was a combination of the company’s platform strength and how customers tend to use more of Unity’s services over time, which she described as growing with their customers. And the second key element was 2020’s unique dynamics that gave Unity a “tailwind” thanks to “increased usage, particularly in gaming.”
Looking at our own gaming levels in 2020 compared to 2019, that checks out.
This post closes the book on this week’s IPO class. Tired yet? Don’t be. Palantir is up next, and then Asana .
“Like most of the best things in my life,” Conan O’Brien explains, with a wry smile, “the success of the podcast was a complete surprise.” The answer is a typically self-effacing one from the comedian. Since launching “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” nearly two years ago, the show has quickly risen up the podcasting charts to become one of the country’s most popular.
For those who have followed his 30-odd-year career in entertainment, it’s easy to see why. Quick-witted and almost superhumanly affable, the transition to podcasting seems almost a given in retrospect. After all, hosting a series of late-night network talk shows for decades isn’t exactly starting from scratch when it comes to launching a new entertainment venture. Nor, for that matter, is having tens of millions of Twitter followers and your own online media company, Team Coco.
Not that things have always been easy. A long-promised Tonight Show slot wasn’t all he’d hoped for, leading to a very public exit from the most-coveted show in late night after just under eight months. It was the shortest tenure in the series’ history, culminating in a televised “exit interview” with Steve Carrell that found The Office star shredding his NBC badge. But O’Brien’s late-night hiatus was short-lived. Later that year, he returned with TBS’ Conan, which will celebrate its 10th year on the air in November (and is renewed at least through 2022).
The 2018 launch of “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” found the comedian embracing the new-found freedom of podcasting.
“There are a couple of things about doing podcasts that are superior or more fun than doing a talk show,” a quarantine-haired O’Brien said in an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. “When I’m doing the traditional talk show, I’m limited. For years and years and years, when it was on network television, I had to take six- and seven-minute turns, which mean I’m having a conversation with you or I’m having a conversation with someone I’ve always dreamed of talking to, whether it’s Tom Hanks or Jim Carrey or Robin Williams. Then after six or seven minutes, there has to be a laugh and we’ll take a break and we’ll be right back.
“That’s not a natural conversational flow,” he continues. “What you can do with a podcast is really incredible. I can talk to someone for an hour and 15 minutes. We try and trim them back, but for the most part, people let their guard down. The other thing I prefer: no hair and makeup. It sounds like I’m kidding. But after almost 30 years of people caking my very white face with makeup so that I look like I’m still alive.”
Team Coco has produced 10 shows in all, including shows from longtime sidekick Andy Richter and actor Rob Lowe, writers Mike Sweeney and Jessie Gaskel’s intimately titled Inside Conan and a six-part mini-series interview with SNL alum, Dana Carvey.
“I don’t want to set a number goal,” O’Brien says. “I’m amazed — in two years, we’ve rolled out 10 different podcasts, some of them unscripted, but some scripted ones, as well. I’m not sitting around saying, ‘hey, we’ve got to get to 35 podcasts by this point.’ Because I’d like them to be good.”
The talk show has soldiered on, as well, undergoing its own transformations in the process.
In 2019, the program was retooled for a half-hour format. O’Brien dropped the desk and the suit, adopting a looser format perhaps inspired in part by the new freedoms afforded by his podcasting ventures. When COVID-19 made the in-person show an impossibility, he started working from home like so many others, switching to remote Zoom interviews. Throughout it all, “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” continued posting weekly interviews.
Asked whether he planned to continue his late-night show after the contract runs out in a couple of years, O’Brien seemed unsure.
“I think it’s a mistake to think of it as, will you stop doing the show, and only do the podcast? Or will you retire and then quietly work on your letters in a shack? I love to create things. I have a lot of energy. I love to try and make people laugh. And so I see All of this converging, I think the message that I would have for everybody watching TechCrunch Disrupt right now is that people need to open up their minds a little bit. If I’m making podcasts, it doesn’t prohibit me from also maybe do maybe doing something, it doesn’t have to necessarily be for Turner, it could be for anybody.”
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
Multiple decades of success, it seems, have put O’Brien in the relatively unique position of being able to be somewhat platform-agnostic. Not being tied to a single medium is a strong place to be when it comes to bracing oneself for the unexpected technological changes that will continue to disrupt and upend the entertainment industry.
“Five years from now our entertainment may come in pill form,” he says. “You could binge The Sopranos. You could just take a whole bottle of Sopranos and then just drink a lot of water and then, you know, just don’t need any red meat.
“This is gonna sound far-fetched, but I think this is the most excited I’ve been in my career, because there were so many ways to be creative. There are so many ways to make people laugh, and I enjoy these new opportunities. I think when you’re someone who has been around as long as I have, you have a choice. You can be afraid of change, or you can be delighted by it.”
SPACs are going to rule the world, or at least, Chamath’s future portfolio.
Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder of Social Capital, has already tripled down on SPACs, the so-called “blank check” vehicle that takes private companies and flips them onto the public markets. His first SPAC bought Virgin Galactic last year, and his second SPAC bought Opendoor this week in a blockbuster deal valuing the instant home sale platform at $4.8 billion, less cash. His third SPAC officially fundraised in April, and has yet to announce a deal.
Now, it looks like he’s going to double down on his triple down. After the bell rung on Wall Street this Friday, the venture capitalist filed three new SPAC vehicles with the SEC. Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. IV has a headline value of $350 million, Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. V has a headline value of $650 million and Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. VI has a headline value of $1 billion.
Those headline values are targets: each SPAC will need to go through an investor roadshow process and officially raise capital before they can begin trying to find an acquisition target. Each SPAC is independent, and may share investors or have entirely independent investors around the table.
The three new SPACs share similar managers: Palihapitiya himself; Ian Osborne, who manages Hedosophia; Steven Trieu, the CFO of Social Capital; and Simon Williams, the chief administration officer of Hedosophia.
However, each has a different fifth director, who perhaps sheds some light on how each SPAC differs in strategy. Nirav Tolia, a co-founder and former CEO of popular social network Nextdoor, is joining the fourth SPAC. Jay Parikh, a former head of engineering at Facebook, who left earlier this year, is joining the fifth SPAC. And finally, Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter and current venture capitalist, is joining the sixth SPAC.
We’ve been talking about the accelerating pace of SPACs this year, and that appears in microcosm here around these Social Capital vehicles. It seems as though Palihapitiya and Hedosophia not only have great ambitions for these vehicles, but are increasingly mechanizing the process of fundraising them and taking advantage of markets that seem excited for any avenue toward growth.
The Trump administration moves forwards with plans to ban TikTok and WeChat (although TikTok gets a partial extension), Unity goes public and we announce the winner of this year’s Startup Battlefield. This is your Daily Crunch for September 18, 2020.
The big story: US TikTok ban is imminent
The U.S. Commerce Department has released details about how it will be implementing the Trump administration’s domestic ban of TikTok and WeChat. Both apps will no longer be available (and will not be able to distribute updates) in U.S. app stores starting this Sunday, September 20.
At the same time, TikTok will be able to continue operations in the country until November 12, leaving the door open for a deal with Oracle or another partner.
TikTok, WeChat and their users aren’t the only ones unhappy about this decision. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said a TikTok ban would be “bad for US tech companies which have benefited greatly from the ability to operate across borders,” while the ACLU said the order “violates the First Amendment rights of people in the United States.”
It’s game on as Unity begins trading — Unity Software, which sells a game development toolkit primarily for mobile phone app developers, raised $1.3 billion in its initial public offering.
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.
Most venture capital firms are based in hubs like Silicon Valley, New York City and Boston. These firms nurture those ecosystems and they’ve done well, but SaaS Ventures decided to go a different route: it went to cities like Chicago, Green Bay, Wisconsin and Lincoln, Nebraska.
The firm looks for enterprise-focused entrepreneurs who are trying to solve a different set of problems than you might find in these other centers of capital, issues that require digital solutions but might fall outside a typical computer science graduate’s experience.
Saas Ventures looks at four main investment areas: trucking and logistics, manufacturing, e-commerce enablement for industries that have not typically gone online and cybersecurity, the latter being the most mainstream of the areas SaaS Ventures covers.
The company’s first fund, which launched in 2017, was worth $20 million, but SaaS Ventures launched a second fund of equal amount earlier this month. It tends to stick to small-dollar-amount investments, while partnering with larger firms when it contributes funds to a deal.
We talked to Collin Gutman, founder and managing partner at SaaS Ventures, to learn about his investment philosophy, and why he decided to take the road less traveled for his investment thesis.
A different investment approach
Gutman’s journey to find enterprise startups in out of the way places began in 2012 when he worked at an early enterprise startup accelerator called Acceleprise. “We were really the first ones who said enterprise tech companies are wired differently, and need a different set of early-stage resources,” Gutman told TechCrunch.
Through that experience, he decided to launch SaaS Ventures in 2017, with several key ideas underpinning the firm’s investment thesis: after his experience at Acceleprise, he decided to concentrate on the enterprise from a slightly different angle than most early-stage VC establishments.
Collin Gutman, founder and managing partner at SaaS Ventures (Image Credits: SaaS Ventures)
The second part of his thesis was to concentrate on secondary markets, which meant looking beyond the popular startup ecosystem centers and investing in areas that didn’t typically get much attention. To date, SaaS Ventures has made investments in 23 states and Toronto, seeking startups that others might have overlooked.
“We have really phenomenal coverage in terms of not just geography, but in terms of what’s happening with the underlying businesses, as well as their customers,” Gutman said. He believes that broad second-tier market data gives his firm an upper hand when selecting startups to invest in. More on that later.
Some of the biggest names in online gaming in the United States have received letters from the U.S. government requesting information about their relationship with the multibillion-dollar Chinese technology company, Tencent, according to reports.
Even as the U.S. Department of Commerce moves to block new downloads of the Chinese company’s popular messaging and payment app, WeChat, it has sent out letters to U.S. gaming companies like Epic Games, Riot Games, and others about their data-security protocols and their relationship to Tencent, according to a report in Bloomberg.
Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which is chaired by the Treasury Department, is looking for information about how these companies handle the personal data of their U.S. customers.
Tencent is the world’s largest gaming company, with stakes in multiple U.S. gaming companies, including the Los Angeles-based Riot Games and a 40 percent stake in Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, which is one of the most popular multiplayer online games in the U.S.
The tumultuous TikTok saga has centered on the ways in which the wildly popular social media company handles user data and how that data could be misused by TikTok’s Chinese parent company, Bytedance. And the announcement earlier today from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross uses language that could be applied to Tencent’s gaming holdings just as easily as TikTok’s social media service.
“Today’s actions prove once again that President Trump will do everything in his power to guarantee our national security and protect Americans from the threats of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Ross in a statement. “At the President’s direction, we have taken significant action to combat China’s malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data, while promoting our national values, democratic rules-based norms, and aggressive enforcement of U.S. laws and regulations.”
Technology companies account for an increasing share of global economic output, and social media companies like Facebook have been denied access to the Chinese market. Some have speculated that the forced sale of TikTok’s U.S. assets could be an attempt to impose the same restrictions on Chinese companies that U.S. companies experience in China’s domestic market.
Security concerns have been at the heart of U.S. trade restrictions against other Chinese technology companies — like the networking and communications technology developer Huawei.
Extending the same argument to gaming may open another front in the ongoing trade war that’s been waged between the U.S. and China for the duration of the Trump presidency. But it would be yet another unprecedented step to wall off what historically has been unfettered commercial access to U.S. markets by foreign competitors in most of the tech arena (excluding things like weapons systems).
Tencent has over 300 investments in its portfolio, including Riot Games which it acquired outright in 2015 after buying a 93% stake in the business back in 2011. The Chinese company also owns a huge stake in Epic Games, the $17 billion game technology developer that created the runaway multiplayer smash hit, Fortnite, and Activision/Blizzard, which produces the Call of Duty franchise (among others).
Any movement by the Trump Administration to further restrict the economic activity of foreign companies operating in the U.S. could have unintended consequences for the nation’s technology industry, as well.
Even the top executives at some of the companies that would ostensibly benefit from TikTok’s disappearance from the competitive social media landscape have decried the approach taken by the US government.
Earlier today, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri took to Twitter to decry the announcement. The ACLU also wasted no time in criticizing the announcement. Hina Shamsi, the director of the agency’s National Security Project, said in a statement: “This order violates the First Amendment rights of people in the United States by restricting their ability to communicate and conduct important transactions on the two social media platforms.”
At Disrupt 2020, we got a chance to see some never-before-seen footage from HBO’s upcoming documentary The Perfect Weapon.
The documentary, which was executive produced by John Maggio, is based on the book by the same(ish) name written by David Sanger, Washington correspondent for the New York Times.
We got to sit down for an interview with Sanger where we discussed the cybersecurity threats the United States faces, the definition of an appropriate response, and in general, whether or not we should be worried.
You can check out the full interview below, as well as a never-before-seen clip from the upcoming documentary.
The conversation was an excellent lead-in to Zack Whittaker’s interview with the NSA’s Cybersecurity Chief Anne Neuberger, which you can check out here.
In a case of bizarre timing, Salesforce announced it was laying off 1,000 employees at the end of last month just a day after announcing a monster quarter with over $5 billion in revenue, putting the company on a $20 billion revenue run rate for the first time. The juxtaposition was hard to miss.
Earlier today, Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff announced in a tweet that the company would be hiring 4,000 new employees in the next six months, and 12,000 in the next year. While it seems like a mixed message, it’s probably more about reallocating resources to areas where they are needed more.
Salesforce will add 4K jobs over the next 6 mos & 12K over the next year. Join our 54K employee strong Ohana defining the future of software. Salesforce is the worlds fastest growing Top 5 enterprise software company. jobs@salesforce.com @salesforcejobshttps://t.co/ffzlmeHhCz
While Salesforce wouldn’t comment further on the hirings, the company has obviously been doing well in spite of the pandemic, which has had an impact on customers. In the prior quarter, the company forecasted that it would have slower revenue growth due to giving some customers facing hard times with economic downturn time to pay their bills.
That’s why it was surprising when the CRM giant announced its earnings in August and that it had done so well in spite of all that. While the company was laying off those 1,000 people, it did indicate it would give those employees 60 days to find other positions in the company. With these new jobs, assuming they are positions the laid-off employees are qualified for, they could have a variety of positions from which to choose.
The company had 54,000 employees when it announced the layoffs, which accounted for 1.9% of the workforce. If it ends up adding the 12,000 news jobs in the next year, that would put the company at approximately 65,000 employees by this time next year.
If we don’t analyze statistics for a living, it’s easy to be taken in by misinformation about COVID-19 statistics on social media, especially if we don’t have the right context. For instance, we may cherry pick statistics supporting our viewpoint and ignore statistics showing we are wrong. We also still need to correctly interpret these statistics. It’s easy for us to share this misinformation. Many of these statistics are also interrelated, so misunderstandings can quickly multiply. Here’s how we can avoid five common errors, and impress friends and family by getting the statistics right. 1. It’s the infection rate that’s…
iPhone users are about to receive access to Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 14. It will come with the usual array of shiny new features, but the real game-changer will be missing – at least until January. For the first time, iOS 14 is to require apps to get permission from users before collecting their data – giving users an opt-in to this compromise to their privacy. This caused a major backlash from companies that rely on this data to make money, most notably Facebook. So why did Apple decide to jeopardize the business models of major rivals and…
Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. It’s that time of year again: another iOS update is out, and it’s time to start considering the upgrade. But iOS upgrades generally take up a lot of room, and if you’re like me, you’ve been complacently accruing stuff on your phone for months. Luckily, there is a built-in solution for trimming down what’s in your phone to make room — and you don’t have to take the blunt force approach of just deleting apps or…
We’ve been hearing rumors about a new Android TV-powered Chromecast — with a proper remote control, finally — for months. There have been sporadic leaks since, but today we’re getting our first good look at the fable remote control, courtesy of WinFuture. Behold: Ooooo. Ahhhh. As usual with Android TV remotes, the physical interface is kept fairly sparse. There’s a directional pad, a volume rocker, the usual navigation buttons, as well as YouTube and Netflix presets. Of course, this being Google, there’s an Assistant button on tow as well. Notably, there’s a power button too; Chromecast modules are normally…
Had Hergé been into businesses, this article would have been a point of interest to him. And he could have avoided the Big Data errors in his ‘Tintin’ enterprise. Are you willing to follow down the line too? Not yet intrigued? #Sigh# Thought so! Let’s get you hooked! Here’s the modern business landscape – Data data everywhere, not a drop to waste! Data has become considerably crucial for modern businesses. In this age even AI is getting powered by Big Data. The secret lies in the capability to collect, sort through, and collate data from diverse sources,This brings in the…
The US government today announced a new initiative to restrict TikTok in app stores, a move which comes after weeks of uncertainty over whether the app would be banned in the US. It’s not banned yet, but the restrictions are very close — and it could be banned outright by November. In case you haven’t kept up, the administration led by President Donald Trump has issued executive orders that would both restrict transactions with the app — which is what this new ban is about — and would force the parent company to find an American buyer for its American…
Welcome to the fifth article in TNW’s guide to the AI apocalypse. In this series we examine some of the most popular doomsday scenarios prognosticated by modern AI experts. Previous articles in this series include: Misaligned Objectives, Artificial Stupidity, Wall-E Syndrome, and Humanity Joins the Hivemind. We’ve danced around the subject of killer robots in the previous four editions in this series, but it’s time to look the machines in their beady red eyes and… speculate. First things first: the reason why we haven’t covered ‘killer robots’ in this series so far is because it’s an incredibly unlikely doomsday scenario.…
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution was ignited more than half a century ago. In the last decade, AI has grown from an academic scientific field to start being a practical part of our everyday lives. The most common AI business strategies we see are built around data. We believe that proprietary data is currently the most strategic moat for AI companies, but in the coming years, it will become less of a unique asset, making proprietary data differentiation less sustainable. Therefore, we expect a shift in focus, from data-based AI strategies, to knowledge-based AI strategies. The big data advancement, facilitated…
