Over the past few months the IPO market made it plain that some public investors were willing to pay more for growth-focused technology shares than private investors. We saw this in both strong tech IPO pricing — the value set on companies as they debut — and in resulting first-day valuations, which were often higher.
One way to consider how far public valuations rose for tech startups, especially those with a software core in 2020, is to ask yourself how often you heard about a down IPO this year. Maybe a single time? At most? (You can catch up on 2020 IPO performance here, if you need to.)
IPO enthusiasm exposed a gap between what many venture capitalists and private investors were paying for tech shares, and what the public market was doing with its own valuation calculations. Insurtech startup Hippo’s $150 million private round from July is a good example. The company was valued at $1.5 billion in the round, a healthy uptick from its preceding private valuation. But if we valued it like the then-newly-public Lemonade, a related company, at the time, Hippo was priced inexpensively.
Not only tech companies took a beating, but as I write to you on this Friday afternoon, the American stock markets were on a path for their worst week since March, CNBC reported, “led by major tech shares.”
A change in the wind? Perhaps.
Notable is that it was just in September that VCs seemed resigned to having startup valuations pulled higher by public markets’ endless optimism for related companies. Canaan’s Maha Ibrahim told me during Disrupt 2020 that it was a time when VCs had to “play the game” and pay up for startups, so long as companies were being “rewarded in the public markets for high growth the way that Snowflake” was at the time. A16z’s David Ulevitch concurred.
Perhaps that dynamic is changing as stocks dip. If so, startup valuations could decline en masse, along with the more exotic areas of startup-related finance. The SPAC boom, for example, may wane. Chatting with Hippo’s CEO Assaf Wand this week, he posited that SPACs were a market-response to the public-private valuation gap, an accelerant-cum-bridge to help startups get public while demand was hot for their equity.
Without the same red-hot demand for growth and risk, SPACs could cool. So, too, could private valuations that the hottest startups have taken for granted. Whether what we’re feeling in the wind this week is a hiccup or tipping point is not clear. But the public market’s fever for tech equities may have broken at a somewhat awkward time for Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash and other not-quite-yet-IPOs.
Market Notes
It started to snow this week where I live, putting a somewhat sad cap on an otherwise turbulent week. Still! There’s lots from our world to get into. Here’s our week’s market notes:
Remember when we dug into how quickly startups grew in Q3? Another company that I’ve covered before, Drift, wrote in. The Boston-based marketing software company reported to The Exchange that it grew more than 50% in Q3 compared to the year-ago quarter, with its CEO adding that June and Q3 were the strongest month and three-month periods in its history.
The fintech boom continued with DriveWealth raising nearly $57 million this week, with the startup being yet another API-driven play. That a company sitting in-between two key startup trends of the year is doing well is not surprising. DriveWealth helps other fintech companies provide users access to the American equities markets. Alpaca, which also recently raised, is working along similar lines.
This week featured two IPOs that we cared about. MediaAlpha’s debut, giving the advertising-and-insurtech company a $19 per-share IPO price, quickly exploded out of the gate. Today the company is worth nearly $38 per share. Why? On its IPO day MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi said that he had chosen the current moment because public markets had garnered an appreciation for insurtech. His share price growth seems to concur.
Until we look at Root, to some degree. Root, a neo-insurance provider focused on the automotive space, priced at $27 when it debuted this week, $2 above the top-end of its range. The company is now worth less than $24 per share. So, whatever wave MediaAlpha caught appears to have missed Root.
I honestly don’t know what to make of the difference in the two debuts, but please email in if you do know (you can just reply to this email, and I’ll get your note).
Regardless, I chatted with Root CEO Alex Timm after his company went public. The executive said that Root had laid down plans to go public a year ago, and that it can’t control market noise around the time of its debut. Timm stressed the amount of capital that Root added to its coffers — north of $1 billion — is a win. I asked how the company intended to not fuck up its newly swollen accounts, to which Timm said that his company was going to stay “laser focused” on its core automotive insurance opportunity.
Oh, and Root is based in Ohio. I asked what its debut might mean for Midwest startups. Timm was positive, saying that the IPO could highlight that there are a lot of smart folks and GDP in the middle of the country, even if venture capital tallies for the region remain underdeveloped.
I know that by now you are tired of earnings, but Five9 did something that other companies struggled to accomplish, namely, beat expectations and bolstered its forward guidance. Its shares soared. The Exchange got on the phone with the call center software company to chat about its latest acquisition and earnings. How did it crush expectations as it did? By selling a product that its market needed when COVID-19 hit, the accelerating digital transformation more broadly, and rising e-commerce spend, which is driving more customer support work onto phone lines, it said. A lot of stuff at once, in other words.
Five9 took on a bunch of convertible debt earlier this year, despite making gobs of adjusted profit. I asked its CEO Rowan Trollope how he was going to go about investing cash to take advantage of market tailwinds, while not overspending. He said that the company takes very regular looks at revenue performance, helping it tailor new spend nimbly. It’s apparently working.
We’re way out of space this week, but I have some fun stuff in the tank for later, including a Capital G investor’s take on RPA, a call with the CEO of Zapier about no-code/low-code growth and notes from a chat about developer ecosystems with Dell Capital. More on all of that when the news calms down.
This week, GV General Partner (and TechCrunch alum) MG Siegler joined us on Extra Crunch Live for a far-ranging chat about what it takes to foster a good relationship between investor and startup, how portfolio management and investing has changed as the COVID-19 crisis drags on, and what Siegler expects will and won’t stick around in terms of changes in behavior in investment and entrepreneurship once the pandemic passes.
We last caught up with Siegler on the heels of his investment in Universe, a mobile-focused, e-commerce business-building startup. The coronavirus pandemic was relatively new and no one was sure how long it would last or what measures to contain it would look like. Now, with a few months of experience under his belt, Siegler told me that things have relatively settled into a new normal from his perspective as an investor – sometimes for worse, sometimes for better, but mostly just resulting in differences that require adaptation.
This select transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Aside from section headers, all text below is taken from MG Siegler’s responses to my questions.
Business impacts of coping with the pandemic six months on
Justtalkingaboutthebusinesssideoftheequation,Idothinkthatthingshavesortofstabilizedin theday-to-dayworldhere. Forus,certainly,Ithinkit’sit’sjustasmuchofafactorthough,of justlearninghowtooperateinthisinthisweirdandsurrealenvironment,andknowinghowtodoremotemeetingsbetter. KnowinghowtohoponquickZoomcalls,Hangouts, andphonecalls,withportfoliocompanies,tohelpputoutfires, and doingallboardmeetingsremotely,andallthatsortofstuff.
That seemslikeit’sprettystraightforwardonpaper,butinday-to-dayoperations,thesearealldifferentlittlelearningthingsthatyouhavetodoandcomeacross.I dofeellikethingsareoperatinginaprettystreamlinedmanner, orasmuchastheycanbeatthispoint.But,youknow,there’salwaysgoingtobesomemorewildcards – like we’reaweekaway,today,fromfromtheUSelection.
Editor’s note:Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here.
Let’s think beyond Monday, for a minute, to the trends playing out in technology this coming decade. While humanity’s problems have never been greater, our tools have never been better. Here’s more, from Danny Crichton:
The 2010s were all about executing on the dreams of mobile, cloud, and basic data. Those ideas had historical antecedents going back in some cases decades or more (Vannevar Bush’s description of the internet dates to the 1940s, for instance). But for the first time, we had the infrastructure and the users to actually build these products and make them useful. It was quite possibly the most extensive greenfield opportunity in the history of technology.
Yet, that greenfield is increasingly fallow. Business has cycles and seasonality as much as media reporting does. The easy stuff has been done. Building an app to text people has been done by dozens before. There are a multitude of analytics packages, and payroll providers, and credit card issuers, and more. What’s required this decade is to start to encroach on the harder questions, topics like how we build a better society, make people more empowered to do deep and creative work, and how we can build a more resilient and sustainable planet for all.
None of these topics have pure point solutions — but that is what is going to make this coming decade so damn interesting. It’s going to take intense collaboration, multiple inventions and products, as well as legal and cultural changes, to realize these next improvements. If you have grown sick (as I have) of the latest apps and SaaS products du jour, this decade is going to be an amazing one to experience and build.
In a companion article for Extra Crunch, he explores five key areas of the future, that he calls: Wellness, Climate, Data Society, Creativity and Fundamentals. Here’s an excerpt from the Data Society part:
Data may be ubiquitous, but it’s amazing how much work it can still be to calculate an LTV, or the return on an advertising campaign. No-code tools solve some of these problems, but what we need is a whole revolution in our data tools. We need to be able to sketch out lines of inquiry and have our tools augment our thinking from data. What are we missing? What gaps in our thinking should we be filling in? What data am I lacking to make a fully-formed decision? Am I overly biased toward one statistic versus a more holistic depiction of my situation? From personal decisions to business strategy, we need better tools to abstract the complexity of today’s modern society.
We also need better thinking around how to network knowledge. Roam Research and some other tools are starting to get better at helping users think in terms of a knowledge graph, but there is an incredible amount of potential if these ideas can be democratized and packaged into easier-to-use interfaces. How do we handle the increasing depth of most fields of knowledge and allow more people to get to the frontiers as quickly as possible?
Finally, we need to further our understanding of complexity and chaos and build those theories into the fundamental structures of our society. How do we make governance more adaptable and resilience, so that when massive crises like COVID-19 happen, we don’t see a complete breakdown in our society? Can we create more flexible systems around ownership and property that can create more diverse housing, or material ownership, or intellectual property? Empowering technology (“blockchain!” but could be all kinds of things) coupled with legal changes could dramatically evolve these core elements of our society.
Even today, we are still locked into a mental model built around paper, titles, and maybe if you are lucky, an Excel spreadsheet. There is so much work to be done to empower each of us through data this decade.
Data education
The building blocks of the Data Society concept are getting remade faster than ever this year, as the pandemic has shuttered traditional commerce and education, and forced open alternative approaches. For example, somebody starting a small business today basically has to use a lot of software. But crossing this initial barrier means they can do things like automatically track the lifetime value of each customer. Previous generations of small businesses simply did not have the resources and skills to do such things with the low-tech options available.
In business today, it’s not enough to just open a spreadsheet and make some casual observations anymore. Today’s new workers know how to dive into systems, pipe different programs together using no-code platforms and answer problems with much more comprehensive — and real-time — answers.
It’s honestly striking to see the difference. Whereas just a few years ago, a store manager might (and strong emphasis on might) put their sales data into Excel and then let it linger there for the occasional perusal, this new generation is prepared to connect multiple online tools to build an online storefront (through no-code tools like Shopify or Squarespace), calculate basic LTV scores using a no-code data platform and prioritize their best customers with marketing outreach through basic email delivery services. And it’s all reproducible, as it is in technology and code and not produced by hand.
There are two important points here. First is to note the degree of fluency these new workers have for these technologies, and just how many members of this generation seem prepared to use them. They just don’t have the fear to try new programs, and they know they can always use search engines to find answers to problems they are having.
Second, the productivity difference between basic computer literacy and a bit more advanced expertise is profound. Even basic but accurate data analysis on a business can raise performance substantially compared to gut instinct and expired spreadsheets.
How do we realize this future? Zooming in from the generational perspective, Natasha Mascarenhas takes a closer look at how school teachers are adapting to the pandemic — and the emerging online education world they are entering. Some, at least, seem to be moving into supplemental part-time teaching. While the educational experience is not the same as in-person, it clearly has its own value. Here’s one company as an example:
Outschool is a platform that sells small-group classes led by teachers on a large expanse of topics, from Taylor Swift Spanish class to engineering lessons through Lego challenges. In the past year, teachers on Outschool have made more than $40 million in aggregate, up from $4 million in total earnings the year prior.
CEO Amir Nathoo estimates that teachers are able to make between $40 to $60 per hour, up from an average of $30 per hour in earnings in traditional public schools. Outschool itself has surged over 2,000% in new bookings, and recently turned its first profit.
Outschool makes more money if teachers join the platform full-time: teachers pocket 70% of the price they set for classes, while Outschool gets the other 30% of income. But, Nathoo views the platform as more of a supplement to traditional education. Instead of scaling revenue by convincing teachers to come on full-time, the CEO is growing by adding more part-time teachers to the platform.
Maybe one day soon, a class about online business will be a graduation requirement for a high school diploma. And we’ll see that sort of education drive more success in the next generation of your local Main Street.
The problems of the coming decade might be harder than ever, but the solutions are there for the making.
Image Credits: Intpro / Getty Images
How to execute a bottom-up SaaS growth plan
The combination of consumer tech product skills and enterprise revenue models fueled this decade’s explosion of SaaS success stories. This week, Caryn Marooney and David Cahn of Coatue management distilled the lessons of this model into a popular how-to article for Extra Crunch. Here’s an excerpt, showing how market leaders approach key metrics and pricing:
The MAP customer value framework:
Metrics: What are the key metrics the customers care about? Is there a threshold of value associated with this metric? Metrics can include things like minutes, messages, meetings, data and storage. Examples:
Zoom — Minutes: Free with a 40-minute time limit on group meetings.
Slack — Messages: Free until 10,000 total messages.
Airtable — Records: Free until 1,200 records.
Activity: How do your customers really use your product? Are they creators? Are they editors? Do different customers use your product differently? Examples:
Figma — Editors versus viewers: Free to view, starts changing after two edits.
Monday.com — Creators versus viewers: Free to view, creators are charged $30+/month.
Smartsheet — Creators versus viewers: Free to view, creators are charged $10+/month.
People: How do your customers fit into a broader organization? Are they mostly individuals? Groups? Part of an enterprise? Examples:
Superhuman — Individuals only: No free version, $30/month.
Asana — Small team versus bigger teams: Teams of <15 people can use the product free.
Atlassian — Free versus team versus enterprise: Pricing scales with size of team.
The stock market was off this week, but not entirely. Root Insurance was the big IPO this week, ending at $24 per share. That’s a bit below its aggressive $27 opening price per share, but is still in the range of its target pricing from the other week. It is, in other words, a success already for the company — and we’ll see what happens when the entire market stops gyrating around the elections.
“For the Midwest, Ohio-based Root’s IPO is a win,” Alex Wilhelm wrote for Extra Crunch. “The company shows that it is possible to build high-growth technology companies worth billions of dollars far from coastal hubs. For the broader insurtech space, Root’s IPO is a win. The company follows Lemonade to the public markets, setting a strong valuation mark again for the neo-insurance startup market. For similar companies like Clearcover, MetroMile and all startups that related to Root and Lemonade, it’s a good day.”
It’s still looking good for any software company with a growth story, as Alex goes on to say, and it’s looking good for more IPOs this year. Like Airbnb.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
A few notes before we get into this. One, we have a bonus episode coming this Saturday focused on this week’s earnings reports. And, second, we did not record video this week. So, if you like watching the show on YouTube, this is not the week for that!
An antitrust brouhaha! As the Vista-Plaid deal (and others) gets a hard look, we wondered what it could all mean for startups a bit more suited for M&A than an IPO.
We capped off with the latest from r2c, and then got the hell off the mics. Catch you all Saturday, and then back to regular programming on Monday morning.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.
Top Stories
Here Comes Apple One
Thanks for all the market research, app developers.
Image Credits: Apple
Apple issued a slight beat on earnings this week, despite the COVID pandemic and a 20% decline in iPhone sales year-over-year, including a drop in China.
But for app developers who already have a large install base to serve across Apple’s mobile devices, it’s Apple’s expansion into the services market that may draw more attention. Apple continues to edge its way into nearly every category that has proven popular on mobile devices. Streaming music? Apple Music. Streaming TV and movies? Apple TV+. Paid news and magazine subscriptions? Apple News+. Cloud storage? iCloud. Payments? Apple Card and Apple Pay. Gaming? Apple Arcade. And so on.
Its latest effort, launching on October 30, is Apple One — a way for users to pay for multiple Apple services in a single bundle.
At launch, the $14.95 per month Individual bundle includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, 50GB of iCloud storage and Apple Arcade. The same thing as a Family Plan (up to six people) is $19.95 per month and ups the iCloud storage to 200GB. And for $29.95 per month on the Premier plan, you get 2TB of iCloud storage, and add in Apple News+ and the new Fitness+, which arrives later this quarter.
Image Credits: Apple
While each plan saves a little money than if paying individually, the most value can be found at the higher end. Which means Fitness+ could immediately gain an influx of new subscribers, even if the user primarily opted for the Premier plan because of its access to News+. That means Fitness+ doesn’t even have to try that hard to compete with third-party membership-based fitness apps. Instead, Fitness+ acquires users by its association with other known and valued Apple services.
As Apple stretches itself into new services markets — say, AirTags subscriptions, or something we haven’t thought of yet — like subscription medications (Health+?), financial news (Stocks+?), ridesharing (Car+?) social (FaceTime+?) — it will have a head start on user acquisition.
For app developers finding themselves having done the job of proving the market for a subscription-based business in their category, they’ll then be thrust into the role of trying to value add on top of a baseline product that offers a deeper integration with the iOS operating system than they’re allowed.
The games are streamed from the cloud (meaning, Facebook’s servers), instead of requiring users download the titles locally.
This format for mobile gaming makes sense in mature markets that are now steadily moving to 5G. However, Facebook’s new service is only available on desktop and Android — not on iOS.
Facebook excluded Apple devices from the launch, citing Apple’s “arbitrary” policies around third-party apps. Though Apple recently updated its guidelines, it still doesn’t allow applications to act like third-party app stores where games are bought, used and streamed from within the main app directly. Instead, it’s permitting the model GameClub pioneered as a means of working around Apple’s rules last year. That is, there is a main app where users can subscribe and browse a catalog, but each individual game has to be listed on the App Store individually and be playable in some way — even if it’s just a demo.
There’s one school of thought (a point Facebook keeps pushing) that says Apple’s rules here are losing it money.
After all, Facebook says its avoidance of iOS is not about the 30% commission — it’s paying that on Android, in line with Google Play policies. Oh, why oh why doesn’t Apple want its 30%, too?, Facebook cries.
The answer is because Facebook’s iOS snub is part of its long-term strategy. To say it’s not about the money is disingenuous. Facebook at launch is already taking the 30% when in-app purchases are made on the web version of its cloud gaming services.
What’s really happening is that Facebook is making a calculated risk. It’s betting that regulators will ultimately force Apple to permit third-party app stores on iOS and maybe even end Apple’s requirements around in-app purchases, allowing alternative payments. If that comes to pass, the 30% goes back in Facebook’s own pocket.
Even if regulators only push Apple to allow third-party payment systems in addition to the Apple Pay requirement, Facebook could still make money when users picked the Facebook payment option. And it’s ready. Facebook has already built out Facebook Pay infrastructure and it’s now encouraging Facebook Pay usage by redesigning Facebook and Instagram as online shopping platforms.
You’ll just need the Facebook app on Android. iOS won’t work for now. Because, Apple (sigh).
And you’ll need to be in the U.S. for now. Because, data centers.
You can also play our cloud-streamed games on desktop at https://t.co/wbEyHZ1dB1. Because, internet.
This all makes the near-term loss of cloud gaming users on iOS worth the risk. Instead of catering to the iOS base, Facebook is raising a stink about “Apple’s rules” to make it look like Apple is harming the market and stifling competition. In reality, Facebook could very easily list its handful of gaming titles separately, if it desired, as per Apple’s current rules — especially because many are more casual games than those found on xCloud or Stadia.
But that wouldn’t help its larger goal: to see Apple’s App Store regulated.
It’s not even like Facebook is being shy about its motives here. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly stated that Apple’s control of the App Store “deserves scrutiny.”
“I do think that there are questions that people should be looking into about that control of the App store and whether that is enabling as robust of a competitive dynamic,” he said in an Axios interview. “…I think some of the behavior certainly raises questions. And I do think it’s something that deserves scrutiny.”
TikTok Goes Shopping
Image Credits: Shopify
Remember how Walmart angled in on that TikTok acquisition (whose status is still unknown) and everyone was wondering what the heck Walmart was doing? Well, it was thinking ahead.
TikTok this week partnered with Shopify on a social commerce initiative. The deal aims to make it easier for Shopify’s moer than 1 million merchants to reach TikTok’s younger audience and drive sales, by creating and optimizing TikTok campaigns from their Shopify dashboard.
The ad tools allow merchants to create native, shareable content that turns their products into In-Feed video ads that will resonate with the TikTok community. Merchants will be able to target their audiences across gender, age, user behavior and video category (see, TikTok does have SOME data on you!), and then track the campaign’s performance over time.
As a part of this effort, Shopify merchants can also install or connect their “TikTok Pixel” — a tool that helps them to more easily track conversions driven by their TikTok ad campaigns.
The campaigns’ costs will vary, based on the merchant’s own business objectives and how much they want to spend.
The partnership will eventually expand to include other in-app shopping features, as well.
The TikTok-Shopify partnership could help the video platform better compete against other sources of social commerce, including the growing number of live stream shopping apps as well as efforts from Facebook and its family of apps.
Weekly News Round-Up
Platforms
Epic says Apple has “no right to the fruits of Epic’s labor” in its latest court filing. “Consumers who choose to make in-app purchases in Fortnite pay for Epic’s creativity, innovation and effort—to enjoy an experience that Epic has designed,” the filing said. The company is making the point that it did the work to create an in-game marketplace for its players to use. The App Store and its payments system are not necessary — they’re forced upon Epic so Apple can ” maintain its monopoly,” Epic’s lawyers said.
Adoption of iOS 14 reaches 46.36% six weeks after launch, according to Mixpanel data.
Apple releases App Store server notifications into production. The notifications provide developers with real-time updates on a subscriber’s status, allowing app makers to create customized user experiences.
Facebook provides new guidance for partners on iOS 14 SKAdNetwork. The company said it will release an updated version of the Facebook SDK by early Q1 to support the upcoming iOS 14 privacy feature requirements, noting that “guidance from Apple remains limited.” The new version of the Facebook SDK will provide support for Apple’s SKAdNetwork API and conversion value management.
Google tests a new “app comparison” feature on Google Play that lets you analyze multiple apps across metrics, like ease of use, features, downloads and star rating. Google confirmed the test was live, but downplayed it saying it was “small” and the company had no plans for a broader rollout at this time.
Apple search crawler activity could be pointing to Apple’s plans to build its own search engine to rival Google. In iOS 14, Apple can now display its own search results when users type in queries from its home screen, bypassing Google.
ExxonMobile embraces Apple’s App Clips. The fuel company will bring the lightweight App Clips and Apple Pay to more than 11,500 Exxon and Mobil gas stations across the U.S., allowing consumers to scan a QR code on the pump to pay via an App Clip version of the ExxonMobil app.
Policies
Search engine app makers tell the European Commission that the Android choice screen isn’t working to remedy antitrust issues. Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Lilo, Qwant and Seznam signed the letter to the Commission.
Big technology platforms asked the E.U. to protect them from legal liabilities over removing hate speech and illegal content, reports Bloomberg, citing a paper from Edima, an association representing Alphabet’s Google, Facebook, ByteDance and others.
Trends
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
U.S. home improvement brand app adoption doubled over 2019 since March, per Sensor Tower. As COVID stuck people at home, first-time installs of top home improvement brand apps in the U.S. from March to September 2020 doubled year-over-year, climbing 103%. MAUs grew 35% during that time.
U.S. Adoption of Food & Drink apps climbed 30% during COVID-19, also per Sensor Tower. Worldwide, these apps saw a slowdown in download growth in Q3 with a +14% growth rate — slower than other previous third quarters.
Samsung reclaims the No. 1 spot in the Indian smartphone market, beating Xiaomi. The new data from marketing research firm Counterpoint conflicts with a report last week from Canalys, making it a close race.
Facebook is losing users in the U.S. and Canada. The company reported during its Q3 earnings that user growth in these key markets was slowing after the COVID surge. The company now has 196 million users in North America, down from 198 million in Q2, and it expects the decline to continue. DAUs and MAUs in these markets were also flat or down slightly in the quarter.
T-Mobile launches its own skinny bundles of live TV for phones. The telco introduced its TVision lineup, which includes four tiers, Vibe, Live, Live+ and Live Zone, at $10, $40, $50 and $60 per month, respectively. Vibe includes more than 30 channels of live and on-demand content, while Live adds live news and sports. The other tiers add even more channels. Add-ons like Starz, Showtime and Epix are also available.
Facebook launches cloud gaming on desktop and Android, but not on iOS. The company excluded Apple devices from its free-to-play gaming service due to what it called Apple’s “arbitrary” policies.
Spotify to raise prices for its streaming service plans. During its Q3 earnings, CEO Daniel Ek said the company would “further expand price increases” as a result of its expanded content library of originals and exclusive podcasts, which provide more value to listeners. The company has tested price hikes for its Family Plan in several markets already.
True, a social networking app that promised to protect user privacy, found to be exposing private messages and user locations.
A massive analysis of the COVID-19 tracing app ecosystem tracks the permissions the apps require, SDKs in use, location-tracking abilities and more.
PUBG Mobile to terminate all service and access to users in India on October 30, after the country banned the game from the world’s second largest internet market over cybersecurity concerns due to its China ties. PUBG already tried cutting ties with its Chinese publishing partner, Tencent Games, but critics called this a Band-Aid if Tencent still had a hand in game development.
Sony’s PlayStation app gets an upgradebefore the PS5 launch on November 12. The updated app introduced a completely redesigned interface, with a home screen where you can see what friends are playing, voice chat support for up to 15 people, integrated messages and PS Store and news. When, the PS5 arrives, the app will allow users to remotely launch their games, manage storage and more.
Instagram extends time limits on live streams to four hours, the same as Facebook live streams on mobile. It will also soon support archiving of live video content.
YouTube revamps its mobile appwith new gestures, video chapter lists and others changes. The video chapter lists expand the feature introduced in May, and now turn chapters into scrollable lists, each with their own video thumbnail.
Microsoft Office apps add mouse and trackpad support for iPadOS, meaning you can now use Apple’s new Magic Keyboard with apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is launching a debit card in the U.S. later this year. The Visa debit will work with Visa-compatible payment terminals, online checkout interfaces and ATMs. A mobile app will allow you to control how you want to spend your cryptocurrencies.
Eko asks court to freeze Quibi assets related to its turnstyle tech. Even though Quibi is shutting down, Eko’s case against the mobile streaming service continues. Eko wants a payout of at least $96.5 million for infringing on its intellectual property.
TikTok countersues Triller. The China-based, ByteDance-owned video app asks a U.S. judge to rule on Triller’s patent infringement allegations. Triller had filed a suit in late July,
TikTok parent ByteDance launches a smart lamp with a camera, display and virtual assistant. The device works with a mobile app and its aimed at helping kids with homework, in an education push.
TikTok expands its in-app Election Guide to include Election Day resources like information about polling locations and hours, services that can help people having voting difficulties and those offering other details how the voting process works, as well as live election results from the AP.
Funding and M&A
The best webcam is …. your iPhone!
Today we’re launching @elgato EpocCam – the easiest way to turn your phone into a super high quality webcam. Quick thread. pic.twitter.com/4bX4I3WblI
Corsair acquires EpocCam. Gaming peripheral maker bought smartphone app EpocCam, a top video app that lets users turn their iPhone or iPad into a high-def webcam for their Windows or Mac PC. The app grew in popularity due to the pandemic, and its wide support for major video apps includes Zoom, Skype, OBS Studio, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Under Corsair’s Elgato subsidiary, the app has been relaunched to fit into the company’s expanded ecosystem of content creation tools.
Digital health startup Nutrium raises $4.9 million led by Indico Capital for its service and app which links dietitians and their patients.
Bay Area-based Jiko raises $40 million Series A from Upfront Ventures and Wafra Inc. for its mobile banking startup.
Helsinki-headquartered app management startup AppFollow raises $5 million Series A led by Nauta Capital. The company now has 70,000 clients on its platform, including McDonald’s, Disney, Expedia, PicsArt, Flo, Jam City and Discord.
Mobile device management startup Kandji raises $21 million Series A in a round led by Greycroft. The startup’s MDM solution helps larger companies manage their fleet of Apple devices and keep them in compliance.
SimilarWeb raises $120 million for its AI-based market intelligence platform for websites and mobile apps. The company counts more than half of the Fortune 100 as customers, including Walmart, P&G, Adidas and Google.
Phone forensics company Grayshift, a startup that helps feds break into iPhones, raises $47 million. The round was led by PeakEquity Partners, for the company that claims to have doubled adoption, revenues, and employees in the last year.
Intelligent visual assistance startup TechSee raises $30 millionto automate field work with AR and computer vision.
Betty Labs, parent company to Locker Room, a new social audio app connecting sports fans for live conversations, raised $9.3 million in seed funding led by Google Ventures.
Mobile gaming company Scopely raises $340 million at a $3.3 billion valuation. Scopely had just raised $200 million last year. Unlike other gaming giants, Epic and Unity, the company doesn’t make tools for gaming, it focuses on keeping players engaged. Today, those users spend 80 minutes per day on games like its Star Trek Fleet Command, MARVEL Strike Force, Scrabble GO and YAHTZEE with Buddies.
From the makers of Facetune, this new iOS app lets influencers create custom filters that can be shared across social media along with their photos, allowing fans to snap a screenshot of the photo — which includes a QR code on a banner — into order to import the custom preset photo filter into the app’s library. The filter can then be used to edit photos, and further personalized by the end user.
Clips 3.0 eyes TikTok with its biggest update ever
Image Credits: Apple
Apple rolled out an updated version of its casual video creation app, Clips. Before, the app only supported Instagram-like square video, but the new version, Clips 3.0, expands to include support for vertical and horizontal video, making it easier to export videos to apps like TikTok.
The new app also features a refreshed interface on iPhone and iPad, HDR recording with iPhone 12, support for a mouse, trackpad and keyboard cases on iPad, along with other smaller changes, like new stickers, sounds and posters. There are eight new social stickers (like “Sound On” for Instagram Stories), 24 new royalty-free soundtracks (bringing the total library to 100), and six new arrows and shapes, as well as a set of poster templates to use within videos.
Backbone
Image Credits: Backbone
The Backbone app works with the new $99 Backbone One mobile gaming controller for iPhone that lets you play games like Call of Duty: Mobile, Minecraft, Asphalt 9: Legends, hundreds of Apple Arcade titles and other iPhone games that support game controllers.
The controller also includes a Capture Button that lets you record gaming clips to share directly to social platforms like Instagram Stories and iMessage.
Pinterest: The pinboarding app jumps into widgets with an update that lets you put either a small or large widget on your home screen that pulls photos from a Pinterest board — either one you follow or one you created. This allows you to set up a widget that rotates through a set of photos from an online resource, instead of requiring you to keep an on-device photo gallery.
TikTok: The short form video app updated this week to include three different widgets from small to large that allow you to easily access trending videos and sounds right from your iOS home screen.
Widgit: This new widget lets you put GIF-like animated images on your iOS 14 home screen (in-app purchases).
Last month’s report that there may be phosphine gas in the Venusian clouds came with a stunning implication: extraterrestrial life. On Earth, phosphine is a chemical produced by some kinds of bacteria that live in oxygen-poor conditions. Its presence on Venus, announced by a team led by Cardiff University’s Jane Greaves, raised the possibility that there could be life in what has long been thought one of the most inhospitable environments in the solar system: a planet that’s covered in thick clouds of sulfuric acid, with an atmosphere that’s 96% carbon dioxide, and where the pressure at the surface is 100 times greater than Earth’s. Oh, and it experiences temperatures up to 471 °C—well above the melting point of lead.
Since the initial report, though, doubt about the finding has crept in. Three different preprint papers (none of which have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, although one has been accepted) were unable to find the same evidence of phosphine on Venus.
On the surface, the new reports might seem to suggest the team behind the initial findings messed up badly, or is suffering a backlash from overhyping the results. But it was a solid study. The original detections were announced after Greaves and her team found phosphine signals in infrared-to-microwave readings of the Venusian atmosphere made with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. “The authors were super clear. They did a fantastic job of saying that they did not find life—that they found something associated with life on Earth that they cannot explain on Venus,” says Stephanie Olson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University who was not involved with any of these studies. The team went so far as to publish a paper in the journal Astrobiology investigating—and ruling out—known natural causes for phosphine in Venus.
Repetition, repetition
The truth is, the story of Venus’s putative phosphine is not a simple case of a sensational finding being shot down upon further scrutiny. In fact, the rush of follow-up research is welcomed; science is doing its thing. This is especially true when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial life—after all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
“I think this is a perfect example of how the scientific process works,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University, who also wasn’t involved in the studies. “It certainly makes sense that there would be other studies that would try and get at this question.”
The first preprint paper to cast doubt on the original was actually written in part by Greaves herself. After failing to secure more time on telescopes to verify her team’s initial finding—the pandemic has made telescope access difficult and in some cases impossible—she and her colleagues turned to an archive of infrared observations made in 2015 and couldn’t find any sign of phosphine.
This is frustrating, of course, but as Byrne says, “the absence of proof of a given detection is not proof of absence. It just might mean the problem is more complex than we’d like.” Maybe phosphine doesn’t actually exist on Venus, or maybe it varies over time. Or perhaps the archival observations Greaves analyzed didn’t probe deeply enough into the clouds.
Another problem that plagues the phosphine findings is data processing. The two other preprints were written by teams that tried to reprocess the original data used by Greaves and her team, suspecting that the original analysis was flawed. It’s often a challenge to pull signals out of the massive amounts of noise found in telescopic data. Researchers in the original study used a technique called polynomial fitting, which is supposed to remove background noise around the spectral region where phosphine signals should pop up. But as National Geographic reports, the way they went about it might actually have introduced false phosphine signals.
Both of these new preprints reprocessed the data from scratch, without using Greaves’s method. One focused solely on the ALMA data and failed to find phosphine. The other paper looked at both the ALMA and JCMT data. Researchers found no phosphine signal in the ALMA data and detected a signal in the JCMT set that might be explained by sulfur dioxide gas.
Moreover, the ALMA observatory recently found an error in its calibration system used to collect the data Greaves and her team worked with. That doesn’t mean they had things wrong in the first place. “Even if the ALMA data are found to be erroneous, there’s still an explanation required for whether or not the [JCMT] data are correct,” says Byrne. “I don’t think this is all that clear cut in saying ‘Yes, there’s phosphine’ or ‘No, there is not.’”
Nor is it clear cut whose methodology is more “correct.” “There’s no official recipe or set of rules for how this is supposed to be done in studying biosignatures,” says Olson. Indeed, many advances in science come from the fact that different groups approach problems differently, revealing insights and clues that others didn’t notice.
The key is transparency. “Whatever method one uses, as long as it’s well documented and accessible—which is what we’ve seen with the Greaves paper and the follow-up preprint investigations—as long as it’s reproducible, that’s what matters,” says Byrne. Disagreements are fine, and as long as they can be discussed openly, that’s good science.
After verifying
Should researchers even reach a consensus that phosphine does exist on Venus, that doesn’t mean there’s life on the planet. “Phosphine is definitely a potential biosignature, but it’s not only a biosignature,” says Byrne. Phosphine is produced on Earth by bacteria living in sewage, swamps, marshlands, rice fields, and animal intestines—but we know it’s also produced in some industrial applications, and on gaseous planets like Saturn and Jupiter where it’s thought life can’t survive. As for what’s going on in the case of Venus, we don’t know enough about the planet to totally rule out some strange chemistry we’ve never seen before.
The same applies to other potential biosignatures we’ve discovered in the solar system. “I can’t think of a single compound that we can easily measure that would only definitively indicate life,” says Byrne. Methane is produced by many kinds of bacteria on Earth (including those living in cattle), but it’s also spewed by volcanoes. Breathable oxygen (in the form of O2) was created by Earth’s first cyanobacteria, but strange reactions involving sunlight and a mineral called titania also produce it on other worlds.
When it comes to Venus, “this will be a debate that we’ll be having for years to come,” says Olson. And that’s because no single clue can be concrete proof of life unless we send a mission to make direct observations.
“There are things we can do in the meantime,” says Byrne. “But until we go there, it’s basically academic. The only way to answer these questions is to go there.”
