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Snapchat redesigns its app with new action bar

Published June 11, 2020

Snap is unveiling some important changes for Snapchat at its Snap Partner Summit. The navigation has been rethought with a new action bar at the bottom that lets you access Snap Map and Snap Originals in just a tap.

Snap Map is also getting some brand new features to compete head-to-head with Google Maps. A new banner called “Happening Now” is also being rolled out to all users in the U.S. with a curated selection of stories at the top of the Discover tab.

Snap has been testing the new design for a while and it is now official. While Snapchat has always been a bit obscure to figure out for newcomers, navigation has been greatly simplified with the redesign.

For instance, Snapchat now has a good old navigation bar with five tabs at the bottom. The company calls it the action bar, as it’s supposed to change contextually based on what you’re doing. But at heart, it’s simply a way to access some of Snap’s most popular products in just a tap.

Old-school users will still feel at home with conversations on the left of the camera and stories on the right of the camera. But there are now two additional tabs.

All the way at the bottom left, Snap Map now has its own button — you no longer have to pull down from the camera screen to access the map.

At the bottom right, you’ll find two buttons that replace the previous Discover button. The old Discover tab is now called Stories. It features stories from friends, subscriptions and story recommendations.

If you swipe right one more time, you’ll find a new tab called Discover. It replaces the previously hidden tab called Shows. It features Snap Originals, the company’s original video content, stories that are currently trending on the platform and a new “Happening Now” section (more on that below).

Many apps copied Snapchat’s design over the years. Swiping your screen left and right to switch from one tab to another is a fluid and seamless experience. Square’s Cash App is a great example of how it feels.

But it creates some issues around discoverability. Many users probably didn’t know they could access Snap Map by swiping down on the screen, for instance.

Tapping on buttons feels like clicking on links on a website. It’s less elegant but it’s efficient, as you can see the buttons right here on the screen. Snapchat already switched to a hybrid model with buttons to access conversations and the Discover tab for those who don’t know they can swipe left and right. With the new buttons, it should be even easier to figure out what you can do in the app.

Find local businesses in Snap Map

Snap Map is the company’s take on a mapping product. It lets you view the location of your friends in real time — or at least those who have chosen to share their location with you. It also lets you tap on popular places to see what’s happening right now based on Our Story (public stories).

There are now 200 million people using Snap Map every month. And the company is about to overhaul it with a lot more information. The company is in the process of adding millions of listings for businesses around the world.

Starting today, you can tap on your favorite places and view some information, such as the address, hours of operation and reviews from TripAdvisor and Foursquare. In the U.S., users can also tap on a button to order food using Postmates, DoorDash and Uber Eats.

This represents a new revenue opportunity for Snap as well. Local businesses will be able to buy ads on Snap Map to highlight their bar, restaurant and business.

A new “Happening Now” banner based on a curation of news stories

Snap is launching a news aggregator of some sort in the Discover tab. At the top of the screen, there’s a new Happening Now section.

Happening Now is based on updates across stories covering politics, entertainment, sports and more. Many news organizations already have their own stories in the Discover tab. With Happening Now, Snap compiles content from partners, such as The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Reuters, NBC News, ESPN, NowThis, E! News and BuzzFeed News.

When you tap on the banner, you can see news content from various sources organized by categories — local, world, sports, politics, etc. The company is rolling out this feature to all users based in the U.S. starting today. It’ll be rolled out to other countries in the next year.

Finally, you can share public stories based on topics. When you share a story, you can choose to share it publicly by tapping on Our Story. It is matched with a location or an event.

Starting today, you can also match it with a topic using topic stickers, such as “Life Hacks” or “Oddly Satisfying.” Users can browse stories based on topics, creating a laid-back experience based on your interests.

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Snap announces new slate of Snap Originals

Published June 11, 2020

Snap is going full speed ahead with its original content strategy. The company announced that it has expanded previous partnerships with ESPN, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, the NBA and the NFL for new Shows and Snap Originals.

The new slate of Snap Originals includes unscripted series, docuseries as well as scripted dramas and comedies. Here are some of the highlights:

Coach Kev (Laugh Out Loud), an unscripted show about Kevin Hart giving you advice, inspiration and more.
Fake Up, a show with optical illusion make-up artists transforming their own faces.
Move It, an immersive dance show featuring some of the biggest dance influencers.

When it comes to docuseries, here’s an early look at what’s coming up:

There are also three scripted series coming up:

Frogtown, a series directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Thirteen) about an all-girl skating crew.
Action Royale, a show about an underground esports gambling ring.
Total Badass Wrestling, a story of mentorship between a young wrestler and a well-known wrestler looking for his second act.

A few existing Snap Originals are also being renewed for another season, such as Dead of Night, Face Forward, Nikita Unfiltered and Vs The World.

Some of those shows have been quite popular, with Dead of Night attracting 15 million viewers, Nikita Unfiltered attracting 22 million viewers and Will From Home (featuring Will Smith) attracting 35 million viewers.

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Challenger bank Bnext revamps rewards for purchases in partner stores

Published June 8, 2020

Spanish startup Bnext is revamping its cashback program so that you can buy from partner stores directly from the Bnext app and get some money back. The company has partnered with Button and the feature is available as an open beta.

Traditional cashback portals are a bit clunky. When you find an offer that gives you 2% of your money back, you click on the offer, get redirected to the partner site and hope that your purchase will be registered. A bit later, you get some money back on the cashback website, which you need to cash out to your bank account.

If you’re using Bnext as your bank account, you’ll be able to access rewards directly from your banking app. In addition to that, you don’t get redirected to another site as you purchase goods directly from the Bnext app.

There are multiple levels. If you’re making your first purchase through the feature, you get 1% in savings on average. If you’ve made more than three purchases over the past 30 days, you get 3% in savings on average. In order to reach level 3, you need a premium Bnext subscription. With that level, you get 5% in savings on average.

Partners include AliExpress, Booking.com, eDreams, Europcar, Nike, Just Eat and more. Eventually, the startup wants to let you earn rewards from in-store purchases as well. Bnext is creating a new revenue stream with this feature as the startup will keep a share of the revenue from each transaction.

Bnext provides current accounts and payment cards. You can receive notifications for each transaction with your card, and temporarily lock and unlock your card. You don’t pay any foreign transaction fee as long as you spend less than €2,000 per month with a standard account.

The company has also put together a marketplace of fintech products. You can earn interest by lending money to small companies on October, get a loan, an insurance product and more.

Earlier this year, the startup expanded to Mexico. The company plans to roll out rewards in Mexico soon. Bnext has managed to attract a bit less than 400,000 users.

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This Week in Apps: Protests impact app stores, FTC fines app developer, kids’ app trends

Published June 6, 2020

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch 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.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week, we’re taking a look at how the civil unrest and George Floyd protests played out across the app stores. The events led some apps — including private messaging apps, police scanners and alerting apps, and other social communication apps — to surge, and even break records. Google decided to delay the launch of Android 11 beta 1 in light of the recent events.

We’re also keeping up with COVID-19 apps and how the pandemic is changing app usage and consumer behavior. Plus, the FTC fined an app developer over privacy violations in a warning shot for the app industry; Zoom faced criticism for its encryption plans; Apple launched an open-source resource for password managers; and more.

How the George Floyd protests impacted the app stores

Protests drive downloads of police scanners

Downloads of police scanner apps, tools for private communication and mobile safety apps hit record numbers last weekend in the U.S., amid the nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd, as well as the systemic problems of racial prejudice that plague the American justice system. According to data from app store intelligence firm Apptopia, top U.S. police scanner apps were downloaded a combined 213,000 times last weekend, including Friday — a 125% increase from the weekend prior and a record number for this group of apps.

The group of top apps included those with similar, if somewhat generic, titles, such as Scanner Radio – Fire and Police Scanner, Police Scanner, 5-0 Radio Police Scanner, Police Scanner Radio & Fire and Police Scanner +.

Citizen, Signal and others spike during protests

In addition to tracking police movements with scanners, protestors organized and communicated on secure messaging app Signal. Meanwhile, community safety app Citizen, which sends out police alerts, also saw a jump in usage. According to Apptopia, Citizen and Signal both set daily download records, Vox noted earlier this week.

Citizen

Citizen’s app lets users see “incidents,” based on radio communications with 911 dispatchers, police, fire departments and other emergency responders. The app uses high-powered scanners to tune into public radio channels, then digitizes and transcribes the audio, and turns those into incidents placed on the map. But the app is popular because it’s more than a police scanner; it includes a social networking layer where users can react and comment.

Based on more recent data provided to TechCrunch by Sensor Tower, Citizen was installed around 620,000 times by first-time users in the U.S. during the past week, an increase of about 916% compared to the week prior. First-time installs reached a record 150,000 on June 2, nearly 12x the app’s average of 13,000 daily first-time installs during May. On average, the app was downloaded close to 86,000 times per day, or 6.6x larger than May’s daily average. The app grew to be as high as No. 4 on Tuesday, June 2 on the U.S. App Store, and is now No. 32 Overall on the top free charts.

Signal

Image Credits: Signal

The firm also estimated that Signal had been installed by approximately 135,000 first-time users in the U.S. during the past week across the app stores. This figure represented growth of 165% from the preceding seven days, or about 2.6x that total of approximately 51,000 new installs. Signal averaged about 19,000 installs per day over the past seven days.

For comparison’s sake, Signal was downloaded around 269,000 times in all of May and its average daily number of installs was 9,000. That makes the average for the past week about 2x higher.

Signal is currently ranked at No. 137 among the top free iPhone apps on the U.S. App Store. Earlier, it was ranked at No. 107 on Tuesday, June 2.

This week, Signal also added built-in face blurring for photos, to help better secure the sharing of sensitive information across its network.

Nextdoor and Neighbors by Ring

The civil unrest also impacted neighborhood networking app installs, as communities looked to share information about the protests with one another. Social networking app for neighbors Nextdoor was installed by 185,000 first-time users in the U.S. over the past week, an increase of 26% from 147,000 installs in the week prior. The app also jumped up nearly 50 places in the U.S. App Store rankings, moving from No. 2,014 to No. 156 in the top free iPhone apps chart.

Amazon-owned Neighbors by Ring, where neighbors share alerts, including security camera footage, was installed by 36,000 first-time users in the past week, an increase of 89% from its approximately 19,000 installs the week prior.

Twitter has a record-breaking week as users looked for news of protests and COVID-19

Civil unrest due to the nationwide George Floyd protests drove Twitter to see a record number of new installs this week, according to data from two app store intelligence firms, Apptopia and Sensor Tower. While the firms’ exact findings differed in terms of the total number of new downloads or when records were broken, the firms agreed that Twitter’s app had its largest-ever week, globally.

The app saw at least 677,000 installs at its highest point, Apptopia said. Sensor Tower said it topped 1 million. Twitter also broke a record for daily active users on Twitter in the U.S., when some 40 million people in the U.S. logged into the app on June 3, Apptopia noted. For comparison’s sake, Twitter reported its app had 31 million “monetizable” daily active users (mDAUs) in the U.S. in Q4 2019, which grew to 33 million in Q1 2020.

The spike in installs was attributed to the protests, which were being watched by a global audience, and COVID-19, which continued to spread in worldwide markets.

Apps turn their icons black in support of George Floyd protests

A small handful of apps did the equivalent of the Instagram black square by turning their icons black this week as a gesture of support toward the protests and civil rights. Participating apps included Reddit, Joss & Main and Shop Avani, for instance. Moves like this can be criticized as being merely performative, but one of the companies involved — Reddit — later followed up with real action. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanion on Friday announced he was resigning as a member of the Reddit board, and is now urging them to fill his seat with a black candidate. He also said he would use his future gains from Reddit stock to serve the black community, starting with a $1 million pledge to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp.

COVID-19 app updates and news

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PhotoRoom automagically removes background from your photo

Published June 5, 2020

Meet PhotoRoom, a French startup that has been working on a utility photography mobile app. The concept is extremely simple, which is probably the reason why it has attracted a ton of downloads over the past few months.

After selecting a photo, PhotoRoom removes the background from that photo and lets you select another background. When you’re done tweaking your photo, you can save the photo and open it in another app.

“My original vision comes from my time when I was working at GoPro,” co-founder and CEO Matthieu Rouif told me. “I often had to remove the background from images and when the designer was out of office, I would spend a ton of time doing it manually.”

And it turns out many people have been looking for a simple app that lets them go in and out as quickly as possible with an edited photo in their camera roll.

For instance, people selling clothes and other items on peer-to-peer e-commerce platforms have been using PhotoRoom to improve their photos. PhotoRoom is often recommended in online discussions or YouTube tutorials about optimizing your Poshmark or Depop listings.

Downloads really started to take off around February. PhotoRoom now has 300,000 monthly active users. The app is only available on iOS for now. And if you’re a professional using it regularly, you can pay for a subscription ($9.49 per month or $46.99 per year) to remove the watermark and unlock more features.

“Subscriptions are what works best on mobile for photo and video apps,” Rouif said.

Behind the scene, PhotoRoom uses machine learning models to identify objects on a photo. And the vision goes beyond removing backgrounds.

Photoshop, the clear leader in photo editing, was designed decades ago. There’s a steep learning curve if you want to use it professionally. It’s hard to understand layers, layer masks, channels, etc.

PhotoRoom wants to build a mobile-first photo-editing app that doesn’t lazily borrow Photoshop’s metaphors and interface elements. “What would be Photoshop if you could understand what’s on the photo,” Rouif said.

While the app relies heavily on templates, you can tweak your images by adding objects, moving them around, adding some shadow and editing elements individually. Image composition is 100% up to the user.

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New summer templates are coming this week Wash your hands #photoroom

A post shared by PhotoRoom (@photoroom_app) on May 27, 2020 at 9:55am PDT

Like VSCO, Darkroom, PicsArt, Filmic Pro and Halide, PhotoRoom belongs to a group of prosumer apps that are tackling photo and video editing from different ways. A generation of users who grew up using visual social networks are now pushing the limits of those apps — they look simple when you first use them, but they offer a ton of depth when you learn what you can do with them. And they prove that smartphones can be great computers, beyond content consumption.

Rouif was the head of product at Stupeflix, a powerful video editing app that was acquired by GoPro back in 2016. PhotoRoom is just getting started as there are only four people working on the app, including two interns.

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Signal now has built-in face blurring for photos

Published June 4, 2020

Apps like Signal are proving invaluable in these days of unrest, and anything we can do to simplify and secure the way we share sensitive information is welcome. To that end Signal has added the ability to blur faces in photos sent via the app, making it easy to protect someone’s identity without leaving any trace on other, less secure apps.

After noting Signal’s support of the protests occurring all over the world right now against police brutality, the company’s founder Moxie Marlinspike writes in a blog post that “We’ve also been working to figure out additional ways we can support everyone in the street right now. One immediate thing seems clear: 2020 is a pretty good year to cover your face.”

Fortunately there are perfectly good tools out there both to find faces in photographs and to blur imagery (presumably irreversibly, given Signal’s past attention to detail in these matters, but the company has not returned a request for comment). Put them together and boom, a new feature that lets you blur all the faces in a photo with a single tap.

Image Credits: Signal

This is helpful for the many users of Signal who use it to send sensitive information, including photos where someone might rather not be identifiable. Normally one would blur the face in another photo editor app, which is simple enough but not necessarily secure. Some editing apps, for instance, host computation-intensive processes on cloud infrastructure and may retain a copy of a photo being edited there — and who knows what their privacy or law enforcement policy may be?

If it’s sensitive at all, it’s better to keep everything on your phone and in apps you trust. And Signal is among the few apps trusted by the justifiably paranoid.

All face detection and blurring takes place on your phone, Marlinspike wrote. But he warned that the face detection isn’t 100% reliable, so be ready to manually draw or expand blur regions in case someone isn’t detected.

The new feature should appear in the latest versions of the app as soon as those are approved by Google and Apple.

Lastly Marlinspike wrote that the company is planning on “distributing versatile face coverings to the community free of charge.” The picture shows a neck gaiter like those sold for warmth and face protection. Something to look forward to then.

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Watchful is a mobile product intelligence startup that surfaces unreleased features

Published June 3, 2020

Meet Watchful, a Tel Aviv-based startup coming out of stealth that wants to help you learn more about what your competitors are doing when it comes to mobile app development. The company tries to identify features that are being tested before getting rolled out to everyone, giving you an advantage if you’re competing with those apps.

Mobile app development has become a complex task, especially for the biggest consumer apps, from social to e-commerce. Usually, mobile development teams work on a new feature and try it out on a small subset of users. That process is called A/B testing as you separate your customers in two buckets — bucket A or bucket B.

For instance, Twitter is trying out its own version of Stories called Fleets. The company first rolled it out in Brazil to track the reaction and get some data from its user base. If you live anywhere else in the world, you’re not going to see that feature.

There are other ways to select a group of users to try out a new feature — you could even take part in a test because you’ve been randomly picked.

“When you open the app, you’ll probably see a different version from the app I see. You’re in a different region, you have a different device,” co-founder and CEO Itay Kahana told me. He previously founded popular to-do app Any.do.

For product designers, it has become a nightmare as you can’t simply open an app and look at what your competitors are doing. At any point in time, there are as many different versions of the same app as there are multiple A/B tests going on at the same time.

Watchful lets you learn from the competition by analyzing all those different versions and annotating changes in user flows, flagging unreleased features and uncovering design changes.

It is different from other mobile intelligence startups, such as App Annie or Sensor Tower. Those services mostly let you track downloads and rankings on the App Store and Play store to uncover products that are doing well.

“We’re focused on everything that is open and visible to the users,” Kahana said.

Like other intelligence startups, Watchful needs data. App Annie acquired a VPN app called Distimo and a data usage monitoring app called Mobidia. When you activate those apps, App Annie captures data about your phone usage, such as the number of times you open an app and how much time you spend in those apps.

According to a BuzzFeed News report, Sensor Tower has operated at least 20 apps on iOS and Android to capture data, such as Free and Unlimited VPN, Luna VPN, Mobile Data and Adblock Focus. Some of those apps have been removed from the stores following BuzzFeed’s story.

I asked a lot of questions about Watchful’s source of data. “It’s all real users that give us access to this information. It’s all running on real devices, real users. We extract videos and screenshots from them,” Kahana said.

“It’s more like a panel of users that we have access to their devices. It’s not an SDK that is hidden in some app and collects information and do shady stuff,” he added.

You’ll have to trust him as the company didn’t want to elaborate further. Kahana also said that data is anonymized in order to remove all user information.

Images are then analyzed by a computer vision algorithm focused on differential analysis. The startup has a team in the Philippines that goes through all that data and annotates it. It is then sent to human analysts so that they can track apps and write reports.

Watchful shared one of those reports with TechCrunch earlier this year. Thanks to this process, the startup discovered that TikTok parent company ByteDance has been working on a deepfake maker. The feature was spotted in both TikTok and its Chinese sister app Douyin.

But Watchful’s customers aren’t news organizations. The company sells access to its service to big companies working in the mobile space. Kahana didn’t want to name them, but it said it is already working with “the biggest social network players and the biggest e-commerce players, mainly in the U.S.”

The startup sells annual contracts based on the number of apps that you want to track. It has raised a $3 million seed round led by Vertex Ventures .

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Zigazoo launches to be a ‘TikTok’ for kids, surpasses 100,000 uploads and downloads

Published June 2, 2020

Like many parents, Zigazoo founder Zak Ringelstein worries about his children’s screen time. His worries only grew when COVID-19 led to school shutdowns and kids came home to a world of remote learning. Now, as lockdowns extend, Ringelstein is learning to embrace screen time as a way to sneak education and entertainment into his kids’ digital diet.

Ringelstein, the former founder of UClass (acquired in 2015), launched Zigazoo, which he describes as a “TikTok for kids.”

Zigazoo is a free app where kids can answer short video-based exercises that they can answer through video and share responses with friends. Exercises range from how to create a baking soda volcano to making fractions out of food, and targets kids from preschool to middle school.

To ensure the app’s privacy, Ringelstein says that parents should be the primary users of the app. Users have to accept a friend request in order for their content to be seen, a move Ringelstein sees as key to avoiding bad actors or potential bullying.

Additionally, Zigazoo uses an API through SightEngine to moderate content.

Ringelstein’s first users were his own kids, a test he says was very rewarding.

Ringelstein’s son participating in a Zigazoo prompt.

The testing process made him realize that kids like to create longer videos, and watch smaller videos, so Zigazoo is figuring out an attention span for viewing. Currently, average time on site per user has gone up to 19 minutes and 43 seconds per day.

Ringelstein pointed to “Sesame Street” as his inspiration. Mixing education and entertainment has proven successful for a number of businesses. Kids were drooling in front of the screen watching the characters of “Sesame Street,” spending mindless hours staring at the television set, he recalls.

“The creators of Sesame Street…used the medium to educate kids and entertain them at the same time,” Ringelstein said. Vox described “Sesame Street” as a “bedrock for educational television,” bringing loved characters to the table with former First Lady Michelle Obama or using a silly song to teach kids about recycling.

In one month, Zigazoo has had 100,000 videos uploaded to and downloaded from its site.

While Zigazoo claims to be a “TikTok” for kids, it is competing with the platform itself. Some teachers have turned to TikTok to create lessons on solar cell systems and experiments.

Others are putting together guides of “kid friendly” TikTok creators. And TikTok itself recently let parents set restrictions on content, DMs and screen time for their kids.

Video-based learning is a better way for students to engage actively in an educational activity, versus passively reading a paragraph from a Google doc, according to Ringelstein.

Combining education with entertainment comes with a set of risks around child safety. Last March, The New York Times wrote a story about how “kidfluencers” has grown as a concept, where parents put their kids online, touting brands, and make money off of it. The resulting ethical concerns are why Ringelstein is confident that Zigazoo is needed.

“Zigazoo is a not a kid play date smack dab in the middle of an adult party like YouTube and TikTok, it is a universe tailor-made for kid safety, learning and enjoyment,” he said.

Ringelstein sees Zigazoo’s “friend” versus “follow” feature as key to the safety of kids: Unlike TikTok, where there is a public feed and users can follow everyone, Zigazoo requires users to opt-in to being followed, similar to Facebook.

The partnerships will allow Zigazoo to post verified content using favorite and well-known characters to teach kids about the subjects they care about. And in a world where digital detoxes are no longer a reality, a smarter screen-time activity seems much needed.

Recently, Zigazoo partnered with The American Federation of Teachers for a capstone project directed at millions of K-12 students. Students are invited to submit a video using Zigazoo to encapsulate their learning experience over the past school year, which AFT says is a “far better way to sum up learning than a high-stakes test.”

This summer Ringelstein is launching “Zigazoo Channels” with a select group of major children’s entertainment companies, podcasts, museums, libraries, zoos, social media influencers and more.

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Podcast app Majelan pivots to premium audio content around personal growth

Published June 2, 2020

French startup Majelan is pivoting a year after launching a podcast player and service. The company, created by former Radio France CEO Mathieu Gallet and Arthur Perticoz, is ditching the podcast aggregation side of its business and focusing on premium audio content going forward.

Like many podcast startups, Majelan faced some criticism shortly after its launch. Aggregating free podcasts with premium content next to them à la Luminary is a controversial topic in the podcast community. Spotify has been going down the same path, but Spotify is also an order of magnitude bigger than any other podcast startup out there.

Some podcast creators have decided to remove their podcast feeds from Majelan to protest against that business model.

Podcasts remain an open format. Creators can create a feed, users can subscribe to that feed in their favorite podcast app. You don’t have to sign up to a particular service to access a particular podcast — everything is open.

“We have decided to stop aggregating free podcasts — free podcasts mean podcasts, period. For us, podcasts are RSS feeds, it’s an open world,” Perticoz said in a podcast episode. “We need an app that is more focused on payment. We can’t aggregate free podcasts given that our strategy is paid content.”

The result is a more focused service that is going to launch on July 7th in France. After a free trial, you have to subscribe for €5 to €7 per month, depending on the length of your subscription. You can then access a library of premium audio content — Majelan rightfully doesn’t call them podcasts.

“Going forward, we’re going to focus on original content, we’re going to focus 100% on paid content,” Gallet said in the same podcast episode.

And in order to be even more specific, Majelan will focus on personal growth, such as creativity, activism, mindfulness, innovation, entrepreneurship and health. According to the co-founders, some content will be produced in house, some content will be co-produced with other companies, and the startup will also acquire existing podcasts and repackage them for Majelan.

That move has been in the works for a while. The startup pitched it to its board of investors back in December. Premium subscriptions have worked well for movies, TV and music. Now let’s see if subscriptions will also take off with spoken-word audio.

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Is Zoom the next Android or the next BlackBerry?

Published June 1, 2020

Gaurav Jain
Contributor

Gaurav Jain is one of the founders of Afore Capital, a $124 million fund focused on pre-seed. He was also an early product manager for Android.