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Robby Stein to talk about Instagram beyond Systrom at Disrupt Berlin

Published October 29, 2018

Last month, Instagram co-founders CEO Kevin Systrom and CTO Mike Krieger announced that they would be leaving Instagram and Facebook. All eyes are now on Instagram to figure out what’s going to happen to the photo and video app. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Instagram Product Director Robby Stein is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Instagram is Facebook’s next big bet. Facebook’s growth has slowed down, which puts even more pressure on Instagram. Compared to Facebook, Instagram is still a relatively young platform. More and more people are joining Instagram and stories are boosting engagement.

Facebook currently has 2.23 billion monthly users while Instagram has 1 billion users. Many people have an active account on both platforms. But does Instagram have what it takes to reach Facebook’s scale?

When it comes to product, Instagram has relentlessly released new features over the past few years. Stories have become a creative playground, stars can share longer videos on IGTV and you can now start group video chats from the app.

It’s impressive to see that such a big platform keeps releasing radical changes that will affect over a billion users. Instagram has been moving incredibly fast. And it’s been key when it comes to fostering growth.

Stein will tell us more about Instagram’s product design strategy and what’s coming up. It’s always interesting to hear the perspective of an insider to analyze product decisions and discuss them.

Before joining Instagram, he was the co-founder and CEO of Stamped, which was acquired by Yahoo back in 2012. Stein started his career at Google. In a short period of time, he managed to work for Google, Facebook and Yahoo, and he also founded his own startup. Quite an impressive resume.

And if you want to hear what it feels like to work for Instagram at a pivotal moment, you should come to Disrupt Berlin. The conference will take place on November 29-30 and you can buy your ticket right now.

In addition to fireside chats and panels, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.

Robby Stein

Product Director, Instagram

Robby Stein is Product Director at Instagram, where he leads the consumer product team for sharing, which includes Stories, Feed, Live and Direct Messaging. Previously he was the Co-Founder and CEO of Stamped, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2012. At Yahoo, Robby led mobile video products focused around recommended content. He started his career at Google, where he worked to bring new features to market for Gmail and Ad Exchange. He has been recognized on the Forbes 30 under 30 and graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern University.

Expedia acquires Pillow and ApartmentJet to conquer the short-term rental market

Published October 26, 2018

To keep up with the rising demand for short-term rentals in U.S. cities and compete with the home-sharing giant Airbnb, travel booking site Expedia has picked up a pair of venture-backed hospitality startups, Pillow and ApartmentJet.

Employees of both companies will join Expedia . The company declined to disclose the financial terms of the deals.

“Acquiring Pillow and ApartmentJet will help unlock urban growth opportunities that, over time, will contribute to HomeAway’s ability to add an even broader selection of accommodations to its marketplace and marketplaces across Expedia Group brands, ensuring travelers always find the perfect place to stay,” the company explained in a statement.

Expedia paid $3.9 billion for HomeAway and its portfolio of travel brands in 2015. The deal was its first major move in the alternative accommodations space, as well as the beginning of a series of efforts to outdo VC darling Airbnb. Its latest targets provide software tools for property managers to easily manage short-term rentals on Airbnb competitors like HomeAway and VRBO.

Located in San Francisco, Pillow helps residents list their apartments as short-term rentals without violating their leases. It’s raised a total of $16.5 million in VC backing since 2013, including a $13.5 million round last year led by Mayfield, with participation from Sterling.VC, Peak Capital Partners, Expansion VC, Chris Anderson, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dennis Phelps and Veritas Investments.

ApartmentJet helps property owners earn money off vacancies. Founded in 2016, the Chicago-headquartered startup had raised a reported $1.2 million in capital from Network Ventures and BlueTree.

Bellevue-based Expedia Group owns several travel brands, including HomeAway, VRBO, Travelocity, trivago, Orbitz and Hotels.com. The company is both an active investor in and acquirer of startups.

Expedia’s shares rose 9.4 percent Thursday after its third-quarter earnings beat analyst expectations. The company posted $3.28 billion in revenue, a notable increase from last year’s $2.97 billion.

Microsoft has no problem taking the $10B JEDI cloud contract if it wins

Published October 26, 2018

The Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI cloud contract bidding process has drawn a lot of attention. Earlier this month, Google withdrew, claiming ethical considerations. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos responded in an interview at Wired25 that he thinks that it’s a mistake for big tech companies to turn their back on the U.S. military. Microsoft president Brad Smith agrees.

In a blog post today, he made clear that Microsoft intends to be a bidder in government/military contracts, even if some Microsoft employees have a problem with it. While acknowledging the ethical considerations of today’s most advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, and the ways they could be abused, he explicitly stated that Microsoft will continue to work with the government and the military.

“First, we believe in the strong defense of the United States and we want the people who defend it to have access to the nation’s best technology, including from Microsoft,” Smith wrote in the blog post.

To that end, the company wants to win that JEDI cloud contract, something it has acknowledged from the start, even while criticizing the winner-take-all nature of the deal. In the blog post, Smith cited the JEDI contract as an example of the company’s desire to work closely with the U.S. government.

“Recently Microsoft bid on an important defense project. It’s the DOD’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud project – or “JEDI” – which will re-engineer the Defense Department’s end-to-end IT infrastructure, from the Pentagon to field-level support of the country’s servicemen and women. The contract has not been awarded but it’s an example of the kind of work we are committed to doing,” he wrote.

He went on, much like Bezos, to wrap his company’s philosophy in patriotic rhetoric, rather than about winning lucrative contracts. “We want the people of this country and especially the people who serve this country to know that we at Microsoft have their backs. They will have access to the best technology that we create,” Smith wrote.

Microsoft president Brad Smith. Photo: Riccardo Savi/Getty Images

Throughout the piece, Smith continued to walk a fine line between patriotic duty to support the U.S. military, while carefully conceding that there will be different opinions in a large and diverse company population (some of whom aren’t U.S. citizens). Ultimately, he believes that it’s critical that tech companies be included in the conversation when the government uses advanced technologies.

“But we can’t expect these new developments to be addressed wisely if the people in the tech sector who know the most about technology withdraw from the conversation,” Smith wrote.

Like Bezos, he made it clear that the company leadership is going to continue to pursue contracts like JEDI, whether it’s out of a sense of duty or economic practicality or a little of both — whether employees agree or not.

Snapchat’s new Camera desktop camera app brings AR masks to Twitch, Skype…

Published October 26, 2018

Snapchat is launching its first Mac and Windows software that takes over your webcam and brings its augmented reality effects to other video streaming and calling services. Snap Camera can be selected as a camera output in OBS Skype, YouTube, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom and more, plus browser-based apps like Facebook Live so you can browse through Snapchat’s Lens Explorer to try on AR face filters. And through its easily equipped new Twitch extension, streamers can trigger different masks with hotkeys.

You can download the Mac and Windows versions of Snap Camera now. Users can use Lens Explorer to preview effects and see who made them, Star their favorites for easy access and access a tab of your recently used Lenses.

Despite Snap Inc.’s troubles following yesterday’s Q3 earnings announcement that revealed it’d lost 2 million users, causing its share price to hit a new low, Snapchat Camera isn’t about stoking growth. You won’t even have to log in to Snapchat to use it. Instead the goal is to drive more attention to its community AR Lens platform so more developers and creators will make their own effects. “We’re going down the path of providing more distribution channels [for Community Lens creators] and surfacing their work,” Snap’s head of AR Eitan Pilipski tells me. The desktop camera could win Lens creators more attention, and Snapchat connects to the most talented ones to brands for sponsorship deals.

Snapchat first came to the desktop in January with its first embeddable content, designed for newsrooms that wanted to show off citizen journalism on their sites. But now Snapchat content creation is escaping the mobile medium.

Strangely, Snap Camera has no interface of its own. Really, it should have a Photo Booth-style app so you can record photos and videos of yourself with your webcam and share them wherever. “We don’t want to compete in that space. We just want to bring Community Lenses to whatever apps people are using,” Pilipski explains. One major app that won’t support Snap Camera is Apple’s FaceTime. Why? “I don’t know. Apple didn’t comment on that. Believe me we tried,” says Pilipski.

Because there’s “not even a facility to collect the impressions” and users don’t have to log in, Snap won’t be able to add Camera users to its daily active user count. With that number falling from 191 million in Q1 to 188 million in Q2 to 186 million in Q3 as it announced yesterday, Snap really does need more ways to keep people from straying to Instagram Stories. It will have to hope that when video chat users see their friends or family using Snap Camera’s lenses, it will remind them to fire up Snapchat more often. And Lenses could go viral if they show in a Twitch celebrity’s stream.

The Twitch extension comes amidst more announcements at today’s TwitchCon event, including the reveal of Squad Streaming and a karaoke Twitch Sings game for the service’s average of 1 million concurrent viewers and half-million daily streamers.

The Snap camera equips Twitch broadcasters with extra features. They’ll have access to game-themed lenses for League of Legends, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, World of Warcraft and Overwatch. Viewers will see the QR Snapcode for the Lens on the screen, which they can scan with Snapchat to try the mask on themselves for virality. Streamers get a button that lets viewers subscribe to them, and can set up a “bonus” lens that shows up as a thank you when someone follows them. And with hotkeys, streamers can trigger different lenses, like an angry one for when they lose a game or victory lenses for if they manage to beat all the other Fortnite addicts.

More than 250,000 Community Lenses have been submitted through Snapchat’s Lens Studio since it launched in December, and they’ve been viewed over 1 billion times. Snapchat realized it couldn’t dream up every crazy way people could use AR. Out-Lensing Instagram is critical to Snapchat’s business strategy. The more people that use Snapchat’s AR features, the more the company can charge businesses to promote Sponsored Lenses. With the user count shrinking, Snap needs to show its business is growing to salvage its share price and pull in the outside investment or acquisition it will likely need to make it to profitability. A desktop presence could not only make Snapchat more ubiquitous, but get it in front of older users and advertisers who might be a little scared of its mobile app.

Twitch announces group streaming and a karaoke game for its 1M concurrent viewers

Published October 26, 2018

The teens were out in force today in San Jose for the annual TwitchCon game-streaming conference. There, Twitch announced that at any given time, 1 million people are watching it (up from 746,000 last year), and it seemed like many game lovers were at TwitchCon in person to meet some of the nearly half-million web celebs that broadcast each day on the service. Considering Twitch said just 2 million were broadcasting per month in December, the service’s growth is still explosive under Amazon’s ownership.

Amongst the major reveals at TwitchCon were a new Squad Streaming feature that lets up to four people broadcast at once in split-screen that will test with select streamers later this year.

There’s also a new Twitch Sings game built-in partnership with Rock Band-creator Harmonix. Broadcasters can play to perform karaoke (though only with fake versions of songs as Twitch lacks major label music licenses). Viewers can use the chat to request the next song and control the lights on the virtual karaoke stage; broadcasters can sign up here for the Twitch Sings closed beta that starts later in 2018.

Twitch Squad Streaming

And Twitch broadcasters can now use Snapchat’s augmented reality lenses thanks to the new Snap Camera desktop app and accompanying Twitch extension launching today. Streamers can use hotkeys to trigger different Snapchat Lenses, let viewers try those masks by scanning an onscreen Snapchat QR code and reward subscribers with a bonus thank you effect. Read our full story on Snap Camera here.

Snapchat’s new Camera desktop camera app brings AR masks to Twitch, Skype…

There were plenty of other minor announcements during the conference’s keynote:

More than 235,00 streamers now have Affiliate status and are earning money on their channels, while 6,800 have joined its Partnership program so they can earn even more through channel subscriptions and ads.
Twitch is revamping Gear on Amazon, where streamers can show off products and earn affiliate fees, renaming it Amazon Blacksmith.
Twitch’s Highlight editor can now stitch together multiple clips from across a broadcasting session.
New homepage sections will feature up-and-coming streamers, new Partners and Affiliates or streamers local to viewers.
VIP Badges will let creators recognize their favorite subscribers and moderators.
Moderators can now see how long someone has been on Twitch, view chat messages that person has sent in the channel and see how many time-outs or bans that account has received in that channel to better understand who to boot.
18 billion messages have been sent in Twitch chat and its Whispers feature in 2018, and fans have given creators 85 million Cheers and Subscriptions.
150 million Twitch Clips have been created in 2018 to bring the best game stream and other weird content to the rest of the web.
Twitch users have gifted $9 million worth of subscriptions to fellow users in just 9 weeks.
Twitch will open its Bounty Board of sponsorship opportunities to 30 more brands, and more Partners and Affiliates in the U.S. and Canada in November.
The Twitch Rivals in-person gaming tournaments will double to 128 events in 2019. Some will have million-dollar prizes, and it already gave out $5 million in winners’ jackpots last year.

As CEO Emmett Shear made the announcements, audience members hooted and hollered with delight. They out-yelled even Apple’s keynote attendees. Shear shouted out early users who’ve been with it since Twitch was a Y Combinator live-vlogging startup called Justin.tv. “When people have your back and support you for a long time, we think they should be recognized for it,” he said, revealing the new VIP badges and a counter that shows how many months a fan has been a channel’s paying subscriber.

“You spoke and we listened,” Shear said. That truly seemed to be the message of this conference. Facebook’s F8 conferences held in the same San Jose Convention Center often seem to produce updates that are designed to help the company as much as the users. But Twitch has realized it can’t just be useful. It must remain beloved if people are going keep spending 760 million hours per month watching others game, joke and express themselves. Shear concluded, “I think we’re just scratching the surface when it comes to everyone playing together.”

Twitch Sings

Chat fiction startup Hooked unveils ‘Dark Matter,’ its first feature-length thriller

Published October 26, 2018

Chat fiction startups have been exploring the types of stories you can tell in the form of text message conversations, and now Hooked is taking that exploration one step further with the launch of “Dark Matter.” The company describes this as its first feature-length story.

“Dark Matter” tells the story of Tasneem (Taz) Singh, a South Asian American student at Stanford who, after the mysterious death of her twin sister, discovers that she has the ability to interact with the paranormal.

The story debuts today on Snapchat, with a new chapter coming out every day until Tuesday, October 30. According to CEO Prerna Gupta, the full script totals 32,000 words — the length of a feature film script or short novel: “I think it’s fair to say this is the longest chat fiction story. It’s certainly the longest one we’ve ever produced for Hooked.”

If you’re not already a chat fiction fan, you may be skeptical about reading something that long in text message format. Gupta admitted that she and her husband Parag Chordia had similar doubts when they started the company together.

“I would be lying if I didn’t say if we also didn’t have that question ourselves,” she told me. “When a new kind of format or really new medium comes up, you start with the basics first. You tell the simplest stories, then as you become more adept at communicating with that format, you can start to go deeper.”

That’s meant going beyond text — “Dark Matter,” for example, will include a voice track and custom illustrations.

Dark Matter excerpt

“The length makes a big difference,” Gupta added. “You can take your time, slow it down and spend more time with world building, developing deeper relationships between the characters.”

“Dark Matter” was written by Hooked staff writer Elyse Endick, but Gupta said the writing process was “almost more like a writers’ room — it was very collaborative, she did a show bible, then at each step she and I and our head of content would sit in a Google Hangout and just kind of flesh it out.”

Although the story is premiering on Snapchat, it will also make its way to the main Hooked app. Gupta said that she’s less focused on owning the distribution channel than on reaching big, global audiences — and distributing via Snapchat can help with that. (The company says 100 million unique readers have accessed its stories across the Hooked app and Snapchat.)

“I’m not trying to be the next Instagram,” she said. “It’s not about the app or any given app. For me, it’s really about our stories.”

And while Snapchat has recently lost some of its luster (daily active user count fell by another 1 percent in its most recent quarter), Gupta said, “I think people are underestimating their whole strategy around entertainment, around being TV for the next generation.”

She added that engagement around Hooked content on Snapchat has been “insane.”

“Why are we investing our resources with Snap? Because of what we’re seeing,” she said. “Our audience and how engaged they are, that’s real.”

Tap, a new startup from Sam Rosen, wants to be the Google of drinking water

Published October 26, 2018

MakeSpace founder and former CEO Samuel Rosen is ready to launch his next venture, and it has little or nothing to do with the on-demand economy. This time, Rosen is setting his sights on the world of water.

Tap aims to be the world’s first public index and global search engine for drinking water.

Plastic water bottles are, in many ways, the scourge of the planet. More than 90 percent of the environmental impact of plastic water bottles happens during manufacture, and the Guardian reported that more than 1 million plastic water bottles were sold a minute across the globe in 2016.

Some people have switched over to reusable water bottles and canteens, but once they do, there is no way to search for water fountains or sources of drinking water. That’s where Tap comes in.

In its first iteration, Tap is a bit like the Waze for water. Using a combination of user-generated content and data from water fountain manufacturers, Tap aims to be a public search engine for where to find water. As it stands now, Tap has more than 34,000 Refill Stations across 30 countries indexed on the app.

But Tap also has ambitions to offer a backend system for water fountain companies. Normally, these companies sell a number of units to airports or other commercial or government properties. Those customers then install the fountains wherever they see fit, and the water fountain company is more or less uninvolved.

However, those companies then need to maintain the fountains, installing new filters and repairing broken parts, etc. But one fountain may be far more trafficked than another, and thus need higher frequency maintenance.

Tap wants to offer an SDK to these companies so that when users report bad filters or a broken water fountain, that information shows up on their dashboard.

Rosen sees an opportunity to generate revenue in a manner similar to Google, offering an advertising product for companies down the line.

Microsoft closes its $7.5B purchase of code-sharing platform GitHub

Published October 26, 2018

After getting EU approval a week ago, today Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, the Git-based code sharing and collaboration service with 31 million developers, has officially closed. The Redmond, WA-based software behemoth first said it would acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock in June of this year, and after the acquisition closed it would continue to run it as an independent platform and business.

The acquisition is yet another sign of how Microsoft has been doubling down on courting developers and presenting itself as a neutral partner to help them with their projects.

That is because, despite its own very profitable proprietary software business, Microsoft also has a number of other businesses — for example, Azure, which competes with AWS and Google Cloud — that rely heavily on it being unbiased towards one platform or another. And GitHub, Microsoft hopes, will be another signal to the community of that position.

In that regard, it will be an interesting credibility test for the companies.

As previously announced, Nat Friedman, who had been the CEO of Xamarin (another developer-focused startup acquired by Microsoft, in 2016), will be CEO of the company, while GitHub founder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath will become a Microsoft technical fellow to work on strategic software initiatives. (Wanstrath had come back to his CEO role after his co-founder Tom Preston-Werner resigned following a harassment investigation in 2014.)

Friedman, in a short note, said that he will be taking over on Monday, and he also repeated what Microsoft said at the time of the deal: GitHub will be run as an independent platform and business.

This is a key point because there has been a lot of developer backlash over the deal, with many asking if GitHub would become partial or focused more around Microsoft-based projects or products.

“We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud,” he writes, noting that there will be more tools to come. “We will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love,” he added.

One of those, he noted, will be further development and investment in Paper Cuts, a project it launched in August that it hopes will help address some of the gripes that its developer-users might have with how GitHub works that the company itself hadn’t been planning to address in bigger product upgrades. The idea here is that GitHub can either help find workarounds, or this will become a feedback forum of its own to help figure out what it should be upgrading next on the site.

Of course, the need to remain neutral is not just to keep hold of its 31 million developers (up by 3 million since the deal was first announced), but to keep them from jumping to GitHub competitors, which include GitLab and Bitbucket.

Quizlet hits 50M monthly users

Published October 25, 2018

Most students in the U.S. have used or at least heard of Quizlet, the website for creating digital flashcards.

The company leverages machine learning to predict in which areas its users need the most help and provides 300 million user-generated study decks, maps, charts and other tools for learning.

Roughly eight months after closing a $20 million financing, Quizlet chief executive officer Matthew Glotzbach has disclosed some notable feats for the emerging edtech: it’s reached 50 million monthly active users, up from 30 million one year ago, and though it’s not profitable yet, its revenue is growing 100 percent YoY.

As a result of its recent growth, the company is opening its first office outside of Silicon Valley, in Denver.

“We by no means feel like our work is done; 50 million is a very small fraction of the 1.4 billion students on the planet,” Glotzbach told TechCrunch. “Our focus is growing the platform. If we continue to be successful in that mission, we will be the largest study and learning brand.”

The company has been around for a while. Founded in 2005 by then 15-year-old Andrew Sutherland, Quizlet was fully bootstrapped until 2015.

Its growth really began when Glotzbach, a seasoned executive most recently at YouTube, took the reigns in 2016. The $20 million round earlier this year, its largest yet, has allowed the company to blossom, too. Led by Icon Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Costanoa Ventures and others, it brought Quizlet’s total raised to just over $30 million.

Quizlet raises $20 million for virtual flash cards

Part of its growth, according to Glotzbach, has to do with its recent focus on its international users. The site has always been accessible around the world, but not until late 2016 did Quizlet begin offering the tool in other languages. Today, it’s available in more than 15 languages, a number the company is actively working to expand.

Newly added capabilities have also contributed to recent spikes in MAUs. Students can now access diagram-based content, which is helpful for STEM subjects, an area the company has historically been less helpful with.

Quizlet operates a freemium model but has three subscription products for power users. At $12 per year, Quizlet Go has no ads and provides an offline studying option on mobile. Quizlet Plus, at $20 per year, also provides an ad-free study experience, as well as image uploading and voice recording capabilities. Finally, Quizlet for Teachers offers educators a $35 per year option that lets them create their own decks for students and access to additional data, analytics and reporting.

NBA All-Star Michael Jordan leads a $26 million round for esports group aXiomatic

Published October 25, 2018

NBA legend Michael Jordan is playing the esports game now, leading a $26 million round of funding for the ownership group aXiomatic.

For Jordan and new co-investor Declaration Capital — the family office investing the personal wealth of David Rubenstein, who co-founded and serves as co-executive chairman of the multi-billion-dollar private equity firm, The Carlyle Group — investing in esports looks like a slam dunk.

The company announced the investment from Jordan, Declaration Capital and Curtis Polk, the managing partner and alternate governor of Hornets Sports & Entertainment, and manager of the financial and business affairs of Michael Jordan and his related companies, earlier today. Bloomberg reported the $26 million figure.

As owners of the TeamLiquid esports franchise, which Forbes estimates as the second most valuable gaming team in the industry, aXiomatic has a solid base in the budding world of esports — an increasingly lucrative market.

Indeed, the most successful esports company, Cloud9, just raised $53.6 million in a new round of funding, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“I’m excited to expand my sports equity portfolio through my investment in aXiomatic. Esports is a fast-growing, international industry and I’m glad to partner with this great group of investors,” said Jordan, in a statement.

Athletes and owners of professional sports teams have flooded into the esports industry, plunking down $20 million to own teams in the officially sanctioned Overwatch League and placing similar-sized and smaller bets on companies developing services for the esports ecosystem.

The Philadelphia 76ers were among the first NBA teams to dip their toe in the esports waters when they acquired Team Dignitas in a deal that was rumored to be worth up to $15 million at the time. Earlier this year, Dignitas brought home a world championship in RocketLeague for the Sixers.

Now, the Golden State Warriors, Cleveland Cavaliers and Houston Rockets are all backing esports teams in Riot Games’ League of Legends tournaments, according to a recent report in Bloomberg.

“The next generation of sports fans are esports fans,” said Ted Leonsis, co-executive chairman of aXiomatic and the founder, chairman, chief executive and majority owner of Monumental Sports & Entertainment (which owns the Washington Wizards, Capitals and the WNBA Mystics franchise), in a statement. “Esports is the fastest-growing sector in sports and entertainment, and aXiomatic is at the forefront of that growth. We are thrilled to welcome Michael and Declaration Capital to aXiomatic and look forward to working together on some truly cutting-edge opportunities.”