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Battlefield winner Forethought adds tool to automate support ticket routing

Published September 5, 2019

Last year at this time, Forethought won the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition. A $9 million Series A investment followed last December. Today at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco, the company introduced the latest addition to its platform, called Agatha Predictions.

Forethought CEO and co-founder Deon Nicholas said that after launching its original product, Agatha Answers (to provide suggested answers to customer queries), customers were asking for help with the routing part of the process, as well. “We learned that there’s a whole front end of that problem before the ticket even gets to the agent,” he said. Forethought developed Agatha Predictions to help sort the tickets and get them to the most qualified agent to solve the problem.

“It’s effectively an entire tool that helps triage and route tickets. So when a ticket is coming in, it can predict whether it’s a high-priority or low-priority ticket and which agent is best qualified to handle this question. And this all happens before the agent even touches the ticket. This really helps drive efficiencies across the organization by helping to reduce triage time,” Nicholas explained.

The original product (Agatha Answers) is designed to help agents get answers more quickly and reduce the amount of time it takes to resolve an issue. “It’s a tool that integrates into your Help Desk software, indexes your past support tickets, knowledge base articles and other [related content]. Then we give agents suggested answers to help them close questions with reduced handle time,” Nicholas said.

He says that Agatha Predictions is based on the same underlying AI engine as Agatha Answers. Both use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) developed by the company. “We’ve been building out our product, and the Natural Language Understanding engine, the engine behind the system, works in a very similar manner [across our products]. So as a ticket comes in the AI reads it, understands what the customer is asking about, and understands the semantics, the words being used,” he explained. This enables them to automate the routing and supply a likely answer for the issue involved.

Nicholas maintains that winning Battlefield gave his company a jump start and a certain legitimacy it lacked as an early-stage startup. Lots of customers came knocking after the event, as did investors. The company has grown from five employees when it launched last year at TechCrunch Disrupt to 20 today.

Google’s new feature will help you find something to watch

Published September 5, 2019

Google Search can now help you find your next binge. The company this morning announced a new feature that will make personalized recommendations of what to watch, including both TV shows and movies, and point you to services where the content is available.

The feature is an expansion of Google’s existing efforts in pointing web searchers to informative content about TV shows and films.

Already, a Google search for a TV show or movie title will include a “Knowledge Panel” box at the the top of the search results where you can read the overview, see the ratings and reviews, check out the cast and, as of spring 2017, find services where the show or movie can be streamed or purchased.

The new recommendations feature will instead appear to searchers who don’t have a particular title in mind, but are rather typing in queries like “what to watch” or “good shows to watch,” for example. From here, you can tap a Start button in the “Top picks for you” carousel to rate your favorite TV shows and movies in order to help Google better understand your tastes.

You also can select which subscriptions you have access to, in order to customize your recommendations further. This includes subscription services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO and HBO NOW, Prime Video, Showtime, Showtime Anytime, CBS All Access and Starz.

You also can indicate if you have a cable TV or satellite subscription. And it will list shows and movies available for rent, purchase or free streaming from online marketplaces like iTunes, Prime Video, Google Play Movies & TV and Vudu, plus network apps like ABC, Freeform, Lifetime, CBS, Comedy Central, A&E and History.

To get started, you’ll use a Tinder-like swiping mechanism to rate titles. Right swipes indicate a “like” and left swipes indicate a “dislike.” You can “skip” titles you don’t know or have an opinion on.

After giving Google some starter data about your interests, future searches for things to watch will offer recommendations tailored to you.

The company tells TechCrunch this information is only being used for the purpose of recommendations — it’s not being offered to advertisers. Instead, it’s about Google’s larger goal in helping people find the information they need.

The company notes that you can even get specific with your requests, by asking for things like “horror movies from the 80s” or “adventure documentaries about climbing.” (This will help, too, when you can’t remember a movie’s title but do know what it’s about.)

Google’s search results will return a list of suggestions, and when you pick one you want to watch, the service will — as before — let you know where it’s available.

The company already has a good understanding of consumer interest in movies and TV thanks to its data on popular searches. Now it aims to have a good understanding of what individual users may want to watch, as well.

The new recommendations feature is live today on mobile for users in the U.S.

Daily Crunch: Facebook Dating comes to the US

Published September 5, 2019

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 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Facebook Dating launches in the US, adds Instagram integration

The integration means users will be able to add their Instagram accounts to their dating profiles and add Instagram followers to their “Secret Crush” lists.

If you’re wondering how this stacks up against other dating apps, the Secret Crush feature seems particularly interesting: While you won’t see your Facebook friends among your regular dating matches, you can list them as a crush that will only be revealed if the feeling is mutual.

2. Sonos gets portable

At six pounds, the Sonos Move is best positioned as augmenting a home setup. It’s a compelling device for barbecuing in the backyard, or taking out to the garage.

3. Federal judge rules that the ‘terrorist watchlist’ database violates US citizens’ rights

A federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush has ruled that the “terrorist watchlist” database compiled by federal agencies violates the rights of American citizens who are on it.

4. Google launches an open-source version of its differential privacy library

That means developers will be able to take this library and build their own tools that can work with aggregate data, without revealing personally identifiable information either inside or outside their companies.

5. A huge database of Facebook users’ phone numbers found online

The exposed server contained more than 419 million records over several databases on users across geographies, including 133 million records on users based in the United States.

6. Why Walmart’s Flipkart is betting heavily on Hindi

Flipkart’s major bet on Hindi — a language spoken by more than 500 million people in India — illustrates a growing push from local and international companies as they adapt their services and business models to go beyond India’s urban areas. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. Ashton Kutcher, Ann Miura-Ko and Mamoon Hamid are coming to Disrupt!

Specifically: They’re going to be judging the finals at the Startup Battlefield, hosted by yours truly.

Shared inbox startup Front adds WhatsApp support

Published September 5, 2019

Front, the company that lets you manage your inboxes as a team, is adding one more channel: WhatsApp. Starting today, you can read and reply to people contacting you through WhatsApp.

This feature is specifically targeted at users of WhatsApp Business. You can get a business phone number through Twilio and then hand out that number to your customers.

After that, you can see the messages coming in Front and treat them like any Front message. In particular, you can assign conversations to specific team members so that your customers get a relevant answer as quickly as possible. If you need more information, Front integrates with popular CRMs, such as Salesforce, Pipedrive and HubSpot.

You also can discuss with other teammates before sending a reply to your customer. It works like any chat interface — you can at-mention your co-workers and start an in-line chat in the middle of a WhatsApp thread. When you’re ready to answer, you can hit reply and send a WhatsApp message.

Front started with generic email addresses, such as sales@yourcompany or jobs@yourcompany. But the company has added more channels over time, such as Facebook, Twitter, website chat and text messages.

If you’ve already been using Front with text messages, you can now easily add WhatsApp and use the same service for that new channel.

Atlassian launches free tiers for all its cloud products, extends premium pricing plan

Published September 5, 2019

At our TC Sessions: Enterprise event, Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar today announced a number of updates to how the company will sell its cloud-based services. These include the launch of new premium plans for more of its products, as well as the addition of a free tier for all of the company’s services that didn’t already offer one. Atlassian now also offers discounted cloud pricing for academic institutions and nonprofit organizations.

The company previously announced its premium plans for Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud. Now, it is adding Jira Service Desk to this lineup, and chances are it’ll add more of its services over time. The premium plan adds a 99.9% update SLA, unlimited storage and additional support. Until now, Atlassian sold these products solely based on the number of users, but didn’t offer a specific enterprise plan.

As Harsh Jawharkar, the head of go-to-market for Cloud Platform at Atlassian, told me, many of its larger customers, who often ran the company’s products on their own servers before, are now looking to move to the cloud and hand over to Atlassian the day-to-day operations of these services. That’s in part because they are more comfortable with the idea of moving to the cloud at this point — and because Atlassian probably knows how to run its own services better than anybody else.

For these companies, Atlassian is also introducing a number of new features today. Those include soon-to-launch data residency controls for companies that need to ensure that their data stays in a certain geographic region, as well as the ability to run Jira and Confluence Cloud behind customized URLs that align with a company’s brand, which will launch in early access in 2020. Maybe more important, though, are features to Atlassian Access, the company’s command center that helps enterprises manage its cloud products. Access now supports single sign-on with Google Cloud Identity and Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services, for example. The company is also partnering with McAfee and Bitglass to offer additional advanced security features and launch a cross-product audit log. Enterprise admins will also soon get access to a new dashboard that will help them understand how Atlassian’s tools are being used across the organization.

But that’s not all. The company is also launching new tools to make customer migration to its cloud products easier, with initial support for Confluence and Jira support coming later this year. There’s also new extended cloud trial licenses, which a lot of customers have asked for, Jawharkar told me, because the relatively short trial periods the company previously offered weren’t quite long enough for companies to fully understand their needs.

This is a big slew of updates for Atlassian — maybe its biggest enterprise-centric release since the company’s launch. It has clearly reached a point where it had to start offering these enterprise features if it wanted to grow its market and bring more of these large companies on board. In its early days, Atlassian mostly grew by selling directly to teams within a company. These days, it has to focus a bit more on selling to executives as it tries to bring more enterprises on board — and those companies have very specific needs that the company didn’t have to address before. Today’s launches clearly show that it is now doing so — at least for its cloud-based products.

The company isn’t forgetting about other users either, though. It’ll still offer entry-level plans for smaller teams and it’s now adding free tiers to products like Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core. They’ll join Trello, Bitbucket and Opsgenie, which already feature free versions. Going forward, academic institutions will receive 50% off their cloud subscriptions and nonprofits will receive 75% off.

It’s obvious that Atlassian is putting a lot of emphasis on its cloud services. It’s not doing away with its self-hosted products anytime, but its focus is clearly elsewhere. The company itself started this process a few years ago and a lot of this work is now coming to fruition. As Anu Bharadwaj, the head of Cloud Platform at Atlassian, told me, this move to a fully cloud-native stack enabled many of today’s announcements, and she expects that it’ll bring a lot of new customers to its cloud-based services.

Atlassian’s two-year cloud journey

After announcing Galaxy Fold release date, Samsung cancels older preorders

Published September 5, 2019

The good news: Samsung says it has addressed the early problems with the Galaxy Fold and finally has a release date (in Korea at least). The bad news: The company is canceling the first round of U.S. pre-orders. The gooder news: If you were among those early adopters, the company is giving you a $250 in-house credit to keep you in its good graces.

Shortly after announcing that its first foldable handset is set to start shipping to customers in South Korea on September 6, Samsung sent out a note to customers stating that it would be “taking the time to rethink the customer experience.” That involves, among other things, canceling existing pre-orders. “While not an easy decision to make,” the company writes, “we believe that this is the right thing to do.”

So Samsung canceled my pre-order for the Samsung Galaxy Fold…at least they gave me a $250 credit for anything on their store. That is admittantly quite generous.

I guess I should rejoin the pre-order queue. pic.twitter.com/Nv7OAIMxnN

— M. Brandon Lee | THIS IS TECH TODAY (@thisistechtoday) September 5, 2019

TechCrunch has confirmed the news with Samsung, though the company is letting the email to customers speak for itself. The letter also notes that the company is launching a “new Galaxy Fold Premier Service” for those who opt to pick up the newly rejiggered version of the phone. After the first version of the handset ran into some issues with reviews, Samsung no doubt wants to be the first line of defense should consumers run into any problems with the new $2,000 phone.

The company has yet to confirm a release date for the rest of the world, though it notes that the Fold will be coming to markets, including the U.S., in “coming weeks,” which is on track with the earlier September time frame.

Watch TC Sessions: Enterprise live stream right here

Published September 5, 2019

TechCrunch is live from San Francisco’s YBCA’s Blue Shield of California Theater, where we’re hosting our first event dedicated to the enterprise. Throughout the day, attendees and viewers can expect to hear from industry experts and partake in discussions about the potential of new technologies like quantum computing and AI, how to deal with the onslaught of security threats, investing in early-stage startups and plenty more.

We’ll be joined by some of the biggest names and the smartest and most prescient people in the industry, including Bill McDermott at SAP, Scott Farquhar at Atlassian, Julie Larson-Green at Qualtrics, Wendy Nather at Duo Security, Aaron Levie at Box and Andrew Ng at Landing AI.

Our agenda showcases some of the powerhouses in the space, but also plenty of smaller teams that are building and debunking fundamental technologies in the industry.

AGENDA

Investing with an Eye to the Future
Jason Green (Emergence Capital), Maha Ibrahim (Canaan Partners) and Rebecca Lynn (Canvas Ventures)
9:35 AM – 10:00 AM

In an ever-changing technological landscape, it’s not easy for VCs to know what’s coming next and how to place their bets. Yet, it’s the job of investors to peer around the corner and find the next big thing, whether that’s in AI, serverless, blockchain, edge computing or other emerging technologies. Our panel will look at the challenges of enterprise investing, what they look for in enterprise startups and how they decide where to put their money.

Talking Shop
Scott Farquhar (Atlassian)
10:00 AM – 10:20 AM

With tools like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence, few companies influence how developers work as much as Atlassian. The company’s co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar will join us to talk about growing his company, how it is bringing its tools to enterprises and what the future of software development in and for the enterprise will look like.

Q&A with Investors
10:10 AM – 10:40 AM

Your chance to ask questions of some of the greatest investors in enterprise.

Innovation Break: Deliver Innovation to the Enterprise
Monty Gray (Okta), DJ Paoni (SAP), Sanjay Poonen (VMware) and Shruti Tournatory (Sapphire Ventures)
10:20 AM – 10:40 AM

For startups, the appeal of enterprise clients is not surprising — signing even one or two customers can make an entire business, and it can take just a few hundred to build a $1 billion unicorn company. But while corporate counterparts increasingly look to the startup community for partnership opportunities, making the jump to enterprise sales is far more complicated than scaling up the strategy startups already use to sell to SMBs or consumers. Hear from leaders who have experienced successes and pitfalls through the process as they address how startups can adapt their strategy with the needs of the enterprise in mind. Sponsored by SAP.

Apple in the Enterprise

Susan Prescott (Apple)

10:40 AM – 11:00 AM

Apple’s Susan Prescott has been at the company since the early days of the iPhone, and she has seen the company make a strong push into the enterprise, whether through tooling or via strategic partnerships with companies like IBM, SAP and Cisco.

Box’s Enterprise Journey
Aaron Levie (Box)
11:15 AM – 11:35 AM

Box started life as a consumer file-storage company and transformed early on into a successful enterprise SaaS company, focused on content management in the cloud. Levie will talk about what it’s like to travel the entire startup journey — and what the future holds for data platforms.

Bringing the Cloud to the Enterprise
Mark Russinovich (Microsoft)

11:35 AM – 12:00 PM

Cloud computing may now seem like the default, but that’s far from true for most enterprises, which often still have tons of legacy software that runs in their own data centers. What does it mean to be all-in on the cloud, which is what Capital One recently accomplished. We’ll talk about how companies can make the move to the cloud easier, what not to do and how to develop a cloud strategy with an eye to the future.

Keeping the Enterprise Secure
Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz), Emily Heath (United Airlines) and Wendy Nather (Duo Security)
1:00 PM – 1:25 PM

Enterprises face a litany of threats from both inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CSO and how to move fast… without breaking things.

Keeping an Enterprise Behemoth on Course
Bill McDermott (SAP)
1:25 PM – 1:45 PM

With over $166 billion is market cap, Germany-based SAP is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world today. Bill McDermott took the leadership in 2014, becoming the first American to hold this position. Since then, he has quickly grown the company, in part thanks to a number of $1 billion-plus acquisitions. We’ll talk to him about his approach to these acquisitions, his strategy for growing the company in a quickly changing market and the state of enterprise software in general.

How Kubernetes Changed Everything
Brendan Burns (Microsoft), Tim Hockin (Google Cloud), Craig McLuckie (VMware) and Aparna Sinha (Google)
1:45 PM – 2:15 PM

You can’t go to an enterprise conference and not talk about Kubernetes, the incredibly popular open-source container orchestration project that was incubated at Google. For this panel, we brought together three of the founding members of the Kubernetes team and the current director of product management for the project at Google to talk about the past, present and future of the project and how it has changed how enterprises think about moving to the cloud and developing software.

Innovation Break: The Future of Data in an Evolving Landscape
Alisa Bergman (Adobe Systems), Jai Das (Sapphire Ventures) and Sanjay Kumar (Geospatial Media) moderated by: Nikki Helmer (SAP)
2:15 PM – 2:35 PM

Companies have historically competed by having data in their toolbox, and gleaning insights to make key business decisions. However, increased regulatory and societal scrutiny is requiring companies to rethink this approach. In this session, we explore the challenges and opportunities that businesses will experience as these conversations evolve. Sponsored by SAP.

AI Stakes its Place in the Enterprise
Marco Casalaina (Salesforce), Jocelyn Goldfein (Zetta Venture Partners) and Bindu Reddy (Reality Engines)

2:35 PM – 3:00 PM

AI is becoming table stakes for enterprise software as companies increasingly build AI into their tools to help process data faster or make more efficient use of resources. Our panel will talk about the growing role of AI in enterprise for companies big and small.

Q&A with Founders
3:00 PM – 3:30 PM

Your chance to ask questions of some of the greatest startup minds in enterprise technology.

The Trials and Tribulations of Experience Management
Amit Ahuja (Adobe), Julie Larson-Green (Qualtrics) and Peter Reinhardt (Segment)
3:15 PM – 3:40 PM

As companies gather more data about their customers, it should theoretically improve the customer experience, buy myriad challenges face companies as they try to pull together information from a variety of vendors across disparate systems, both in the cloud and on prem. How do you pull together a coherent picture of your customers, while respecting their privacy and overcoming the technical challenges? We’ll ask a team of experts to find out.

Innovation Break: Identifying Overhyped Technology Trends
James Allworth (Cloudflare), George Mathew (Kespry) and Max Wessel (SAP)
3:40 PM – 4:00 PM

For innovation-focused businesses, deciding which technology trends are worth immediate investment, which trends are worth keeping on the radar and which are simply buzzworthy can be a challenging gray area to navigate and may ultimately make or break the future of a business. Hear from these innovation juggernauts as they provide their divergent perspectives on today’s hottest trends, including Blockchain, 5G, AI, VR and more. Sponsored by SAP.

Fireside Chat
Andrew Ng (Landing AI)
4:00 PM – 4:20 PM

Few technologists have been more central to the development of AI in the enterprise than Andrew Ng. With Landing AI and the backing of many top venture firms, Ng has the foundation to develop and launch the AI companies he thinks will be winners. We will talk about where Ng expects to see AI’s biggest impacts across the enterprise.

The Quantum Enterprise
Jim Clarke (Intel), Jay Gambetta (IBM) and Krysta Svore (Microsoft)
4:20 PM – 4:45 PM

While we’re still a few years away from having quantum computers that will fulfill the full promise of this technology, many companies are already starting to experiment with what’s available today. We’ll talk about what startups and enterprises should know about quantum computing today to prepare for tomorrow.

Overcoming the Data Glut
Benoit Dageville (Snowflake), Ali Ghodsi (Databricks) and Murli Thirumale (Portworx)
4:45 PM – 5:10 PM

There is certainly no shortage of data in the enterprise these days. The question is how do you process it and put it in shape to understand it and make better decisions? Our panel will discuss the challenges of data management and visualization in a shifting technological landscape where the term “big data” doesn’t begin to do the growing volume justice.

BigID announces $50M Series C investment as privacy takes center stage

Published September 5, 2019

It turns out GDPR was just the tip of the privacy iceberg. With California’s privacy law coming on line January 1st and dozens more in various stages of development, it’s clear that governments are taking privacy seriously, which means companies have to as well. New York startup BigID, which has been developing a privacy platform for the last several years, finds itself in a good position to help. Today, the company announced a $50 million Series C.

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with help from SAP.io Fund, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and ClearSky. New investor Salesforce Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $96 million, according to Crunchbase.

In addition to the funding, the company is also announcing the formation of a platform of sorts, which will offer a set of privacy services for customers. It includes data discovery, classification and correlation. “We’ve separated the product into some constituent parts. While it’s still sold as a broad-based solution, it’s much more of a platform now in the sense that there’s a core set of capabilities that we heard over and over that customers want,” CEO and co-founder Dimitri Sirota told TechCrunch.

He says that these capabilities really enable customers to see connections in the data across a set of disparate data sources. “There are a lot of products that do the request part, but there’s nobody that’s able to look across your entire data landscape, the hundreds of petabytes, and pick out the data in Salesforce, Workday, AWS, mainframe, and all these places you could have data on [an individual], and show how it’s all tied together,” Sirota explained.

It’s interesting to see the mix of strategic investors and traditional venture capitalists that are investing in the company. The strategics in particular see the privacy landscape as well as anyone, and Sirota says it’s a case of privacy mattering more than ever and his company providing the means to navigate the changing landscape. “Consumers care about privacy, which means legislators care about it, which ultimately means companies have to care about it,” he said. He added, “Strategics, whether they are companies that collect personal data or those that sell to those companies, therefore have an interest in BigID .”

The company has been growing fast and raising money quickly to help it scale to meet demand. Starting in January 2018, it raised $14 million. Just six months later, it raised another $30 million and you can tack on today’s $50 million. Sirota says having money in the bank and seeing these investments helps give enterprise customers confidence that the company is in this for the long haul.

Sirota wouldn’t give an exact valuation, only saying that while the company is not a unicorn, the valuation was a “robust number.” He says the plan now it to keep expanding the platform, and there will be announcements coming soon around partnerships, customers and new capabilities.

Sirota will be appearing at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise on September 5th at 11 am on the panel “Cracking the Code: From Startup to Scaleup in Enterprise Software.”

BigID scores $30 million Series B months after closing A round

What to expect from Apple’s September 10 iPhone event

Published September 5, 2019

Here’s what we know for sure: Apple’s holding a big event on its campus at 10AM PT on September 10.

Here’s what we almost certainly know for sure: The iPhone 11 will launch with a new camera configuration. There will be probably be three different models.

From there, things get a bit more complicated.

There’s some speculation around whether the company will continue to offer the budget-minded iPhone R as an alternative to the flagship devices. Some rumors thus far have suggested that this year’s models will present a kind of paradigm shift for the line. Rather than introducing an iPhone 11R, the cheaper model could become the base level iPhone 11, with two pricier models taking up the Pro moniker, with a Pro and Pro Max model distinguishing the different screen sizes.

The shift would make some sense from the standpoint of the broader smartphone market. Pricing is one of the key reasons smartphone adoption has slowed considerably. Premium devices like the iPhone and Samsung’s S series routinely top $1,000. If Apple can reposition the price point, that could go a ways toward justifying a faster upgrade cycle.

One of the key distinguishing factors between the iPhone 11 and the Pro models is likely to be the camera. The base model will retain the XS’s two-camera setup, while the Pros will move to a three-camera array in a square configuration. The third lens will bring an additional wide angle to the device, similar to a number of Android handsets.

Using on-board AI and software, the cameras are said to create a composite image that can correct certain shooting errors, offer higher-resolution shots and get better images in low light. The video software on the Pro models is said to be significantly improved, as well, letting users correct color balances and apply effects on-device. The front-facing camera, meanwhile, is said to have a wider field of view, which should help face unlock work from more angles, including while lying down on a table — one of the biggest complaints with the current Face ID configuration.

The device build is largely expected to stay the same, including the top notch, which has remained unchanged since the introduction of the iPhone X. Some have suggested that the invitation hints at additional colors for the handset, which would be in keeping with other entry-level devices, like the iPhone R. The Lightning port, for better and worse, is expected to remain, in spite of the addition of USB-C on the iPad Pro.

Jeff Williams, chief operating officer of Apple Inc., speaks during an event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2018. Apple will kick off a blitz of new products this week, ending a year of minor updates and setting the technology giant up for a potentially strong holiday quarter. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A couple of rumors have been floating around hinting at the arrival of a new Apple Watch. The Series 4 device is reportedly getting a new (likely very pricey) Titanium version. The line is also set to finally add some solid sleep tracking into the mix.

The event may well see some new MacBooks, the first to include new switch mechanisms for the keyboard. That will hopefully alleviate longstanding complaints against several generations of keyboard switches.

Expect some firm dates on the software and content front, as well, including availability for the public launch of MacOS Catalina, iPadOS and iOS 13. There’s a pretty good chance that the company will also firm up launch dates for long-awaited content plays like Apple TV+ and Arcade.

All (or some) of this and more (or less) will be revealed on Tuesday September 10. TechCrunch will, as always, be on hand, bringing it to you live.

TCL adopts Tempow’s multi-device Bluetooth streaming tech

Published September 5, 2019

Here’s an interesting bit of news out of IFA today. TCL this morning announced a deal with Tempow that will bring the French company’s clever Bluetooth streaming protocol to its forthcoming Plex flagship device.

TCL follows Motorola in adopting the Tempow Audio Profile (TAP) technology. The protocol, which Tempow showed off a few IFAs back, is software-based, allowing devices to stream to multiple Bluetooth headphones and speakers simultaneously.

The company has clearly gained notice, raising a $4 million funding round back in March of 2018. As Romain noted in his write up of that news, more than five million devices are using Tempow’s stack, with the Moto X4 leading the way.

TCL and Tempow are making no bones about who they’re going after with this one. A press release touting the news mentions Apple several times, clearly targeting the chips that form the connections between its handsets and headphones/speakers. (Surely the news arriving a week before the new iPhones is a key part of that positioning.)

“There is a significant movement across mobile manufacturers to innovate and unlock the true potential of Bluetooth – the most recent example being Apple’s rumored Audio Sharing in iOS13,” said Tempow CEO Vincent Nallatamby said in a release. “What TCL built with Tempow far outstrips Apple’s sharing features, which are limited to two devices and only AirPods or Beats products.”

The Plex looks to be a solidly built mid-tier 6.53-inch handset, set for launch in parts of Europe and Australia. Meantime, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Tempow’s tech hit an even wider adoption among Android handset makers in the coming year.