Startups
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4 edtech CEOs peer into the industry’s future
When Zach Sims first started pitching his coding startup, Codecademy, he framed it to investors as a corporate tutoring company. That was intentional, despite the fact that edtech is a $5 trillion business.
“It was much easier for investors to understand instead of an education company,” he said, noting that the industry has long been defined by tight budgets and slow sales cycles.
But, as millions adopt remote learning overnight, edtech’s reputation is changing — and investors are scrambling accordingly. The revitalization means that a new wave of edtech startups is upon us. We asked four entrepreneurs who have been working in this space to share what they think the next billion-dollar business will look like. While we’ve covered the investor side of edtech quite a bit, it was refreshing to hear from founders and executives who are on the ground making decisions:
- Matthew Glotzbach, CEO, Quizlet
- Jessie Woolley-Wilson, CEO and president, DreamBox Learning
- Darren Shimkus, general manager, Udemy for Business
- Zach Sims, co-founder and CEO, Codecademy
How to sell: Classroom and outside the box
According to Matthew Glotzbach, CEO of Quizlet, “any edtech solution tailored toward schools and classrooms may find a significant headwind,” such as games or VR/AR headsets that need to be used within classroom settings. “Not because physical spaces are going away, but in this limited time, limited budget environment, teachers and administrators are going to spend their money on solutions that are more tailored toward distance.”
Startups should plan to be useful in both a pre-coronavirus and post-coronavirus world, likely hybridizing tech solutions that are useful for day-to-day classroom operations as well as remote learning.
How to reach scale: B2C or B2B?
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Former Tesla president and Lyft COO Jon McNeill on what both companies have gotten right and wrong
We recently interviewed Jon McNeill to learn more about his newest project, a startup studio called DeltaV Ventures. But we also wanted to hear about what it’s like to work inside of Tesla and Lyft.
McNeill spent two-and-a-half years as the carmaker’s president, heading up global sales, marketing, delivery and government relations before heading to Lyft in early 2018, where he served as COO for 18 months. (He left four months after the ride-hail company’s IPO last year.)
He shared his take on his experience at both places, and what, from each, he is using and eschewing at DeltaV. Our conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
TechCrunch: What was it like working with Elon Musk?
Jon McNeill: To me, it was fascinating. He’s the best practitioner of my craft as an entrepreneur. It’s hard to name another entrepreneur who has started four companies, all of which are worth more than $10 billion in market cap [and] several of which are worth more than $50 billion.
We were in hyper-growth mode, and there were no playbooks. Like, literally, when I started, the company had about $2 billion in annual run rate revenue, and three years later, it had $20 billion in annual run rate revenue. And there are no playbooks for that, so we were innovating constantly to either try to get ahead of that growth or just to keep up with it.
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Banjo’s CEO resigns after report details KKK ties in his past
After investigative reporting revealed his undisclosed involvement in shooting at a synagogue with KKK members at age 17, the CEO of Banjo will leave the company he founded.
In a short blog post, the company announced a “change in leadership” and the resignation of its founder and CEO Damien Patton. The Utah-based company will transition “to a new, reconstituted leadership team effectively immediately.”
“I am confident Banjo’s greatest days are still ahead, and will do everything in my power to ensure our mission succeeds,” Patton said in the post. “However, under the current circumstances, I believe Banjo’s best path forward is under different leadership.”
Patton leaves the company as valuable contracts with its home state of Utah went on hold in light of the explosive report, published in OneZero. The story revealed that at age 17, Patton drove a KKK member past a synagogue while he shot at the building. He reportedly went into hiding at a white supremacist training camp after the incident.
In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Utah’s Attorney General office said it was “shocked and dismayed” at reports of Patton’s prior affiliation with hate groups.
The company’s CTO, Justin R. Lindsey, who joined the company full-time less than a year ago, will step into the top role.
Even prior to revelations of Patton’s past, Banjo had come under scrutiny by privacy advocates for its pivot from a social tech company into a real-time intelligence platform for law enforcement. Last year, the company’s director of government affairs for Utah told a group of public officials that Banjo “essentially [does] most of what Palantir does, we just do it live.”
In its blog post announcing Patton’s departure, the company emphasized its “unswerving commitment” to protecting private data and characterized its work as “technology solutions that protect privacy.”
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Clyde raises $14 million Series A to help e-commerce businesses offer extended warranty plans
Four years ago, Brandon Gell was an architecture student who spent most of his time working on 3D printing modular housing. Now, he’s the founder of Clyde, an extended warranty startup that wants to help small e-commerce businesses offer product protection.
Today, the company announced it has raised a $14 million Series A led by Spark Capital with participation from Crosslink, RRE, Rea Sea Ventures and others.
How do you go from being a product person to the founder of an insurance startup? According to Gell: a stint at a four-person 3D scanner startup in Columbus, Ohio.
Because the team and resources were small, Gell was put in charge of finding an insurance company to work with to protect their expensive end product of scanners.
“I spent six months trying to find a company,” he said. After seeing how seamless it was to work with fintech customer support tools from companies like Stripe, Shopify, Affirm and others, he said it was clear that insurance, and especially the extended warranty space, wasn’t as mature. So he set up an office in his grandma’s New York apartment.
Clyde is a platform that connects small retailers to insurance companies to launch and manage product protection programs.
Using Clyde, customers can access a dashboard and e-commerce apps to manage their protection programs. For example, a user can see how many contracts were sold, how much revenue total those bring and gross profit in real time. It also can see which products are most often purchased with an extended warranty contract.
“It’s a similar type of offering as Affirm or Stripe,” he said. “We give you access to large insurance companies and we enable you to launch the program live on your website or physical point of sale and store wherever you sell.” It has plugins with Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce, Magento, Woocommerce, and more so store owners on the site can add Clyde to their small businesses.
Clyde’s most critical metric is that it has an 18% attachment rate on average, which means that 18% of people that go through a Clyde-powered purchasing path end up purchasing extended warranties or protection plans.
The reason businesses care about extended warranty is two-fold. First, insurance benefits the customer experience. Second, insurance purchases are often the highest-margin product that companies sell to their customers. Product protection alone is a $50 billion market. Gell said that Best Buy drives about 2% of its annual revenue from the sale of extended warranties, but that generates more than half of its profit.
Clyde helps small businesses, like a four-person startup in Columbus Ohio, get a bite of this profitable pie. Most e-commerce businesses have to work with Amazon, thus giving a lot of that cash to the big company versus putting it in their own pocket, per Gell. He says that when Amazon sells an extended warranty on a seller’s product, it doesn’t share any revenue with the seller on how the product performs, which prevents a seller from both a stream of revenue and data analytics.
“Our sort of mantra is that the retailers that we work with are basically everybody that’s not Amazon and Walmart,” he said.
Clyde’s goal is different from Upsie, another venture-backed startup focusing on warranties. Upsie is looking to be a direct-to-consumer warranty replacement, while Clyde works on behalf of the retailer and insurance company to connect the two parties.
Closer competitors to the startup include Mulberry and Extend, which were both founded after Clyde and have raised less in venture capital funding. Gell thinks his competitive advantage is partnerships with top insurance companies, and a strong product-focused platform. Clyde’s entire founding team is made up of product people.
Startups right now need to prove that they are viable in both a pre-coronavirus and post-coronavirus world. And Clyde might be exactly in that sweet spot, as it focuses on e-commerce businesses.
The Series A round closed a few weeks ago, before the COVID-19 craziness began, but he said that the pandemic has led to more inbounds and interest than ever before. Gell says it’s a mix of e-commerce being more important than ever, and customer behavior.
“It’s a shift of customers that want to buy online more, but also protect their purchases more than ever,” he said. “Companies are realizing how important it is.”
New cash in hand, Clyde’s growing while its customer-base is looking for new ways to bring in revenue and take care of customers. If the startup can handle the influx of attention and importance right, sticky harmony will follow.
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Fintech startups amass war chests for the economic downturn
Consumer fintech startups were massively successful in 2019, attracting millions of new users and disrupting traditional retail banks and financial services with mobile-first, consumer-oriented products. Despite the economic downturn in public markets and the massive wave of cuts at public and private companies in recent weeks, fintech startups have been raising a ton of money.
It feels like they’re all building a war chest to survive the economic winter as traditional banks continue to iterate so they can catch up and offer more user-friendly services. This is not the time to raise fees, slow down on product development or plans to acquire new users.
Nine-figure rounds
Back in January, I looked at challenger banks and their growth trajectories, but since then, they have managed to attract even more customers. According to the most recent figures:
- Nubank has 20 million customers;
- Revolut has 10 million users;
- Chime has 8 million users;
- N26 has 5 million users;
- Monzo has 4 million users.
And that’s without mentioning Starling Bank, Atom Bank, Bunq, Bnext, Paysend, etc. At some point, there will be as many challenger banks as non-challenger banks — perhaps we shouldn’t call them challenger banks anymore.
Beyond these startups, trading app Robinhood recently reached 13 million users, international payments startup TransferWise has 7 million customers and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has 30 million users.
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MemSQL raises $50M in debt facility for its real-time database platform
As a number of startups get back into fundraising in earnest, one that is on a growth tear has closed a substantial debt round to hold on to more equity in the company as it inches to being cash-flow positive. MemSQL — the relational, real-time database used by organisations to query and analyse large pools of fast-moving data across cloud, hybrid and on-premise environments (customers include major banks, telecoms carriers, ridesharing giants and even those building COVID-19 tracing apps) — has secured $50 million in debt, money that CEO Raj Verma says should keep it “well-capitalised for the next several years” and puts it on the road to an IPO or potential private equity exit.
The funding is coming from Hercules Capital, which has some $4.3 billion under management and has an interesting history. On the one hand, it has invested in companies that include Facebook (this was back in 2012, when Facebook was still a startup), but it has also been in the news because its CEO was one of the high fliers accused in the college cheating scandal of 2019.
MemSQL does not disclose its valuation, but Verma confirmed it is now significantly higher than it was at its last equity raise of $30 million in 2018, when it was valued at about $270 million, per data from PitchBook.
Why raise debt rather than equity? The company is already backed by a long list of impressive investors, starting with Y Combinator and including Accel, Data Collective, DST, GV (one of Google-owner Alphabet’s venture capital vehicles), Khosla, IA Ventures, In-Q-Tel (the CIA-linked VC) and many more. Verma said in an interview with TechCrunch that the startup had started to look at this fundraise before the pandemic hit.
It had “multiple options to raise an equity round” from existing and new investors, which quickly produced some eight term sheets. Ultimately, it took the debt route mainly because it didn’t need the capital badly enough to give up equity, and terms “are favourable right now,” making a debt facility the best option. “Our cash burn is in the single digits,” he said, and “we still have independence.”
The company has been on a roll in recent times. It grew 75% last year (note it was 200% in 2018) with cash burn of $8-9 million in that period, and now has annual recurring revenues of $40 million. Customers include three of the world’s biggest banks, which use MemSQL to power all of its algorithmic trading, major telecoms carriers, mapping providers (Verma declined to comment on whether investor Google is a customer), and more. While Verma today declines to talk about specific names, previous named customers have included Uber, Akamai, Pinterest, Dell EMC and Comcast.
And if the current health pandemic has put a lot of pressure on some companies in the tech world, MemSQL is one of the group that’s been seeing a strong upswing in business.
Verma noted that this is down to multiple reasons. First, its customer base has not had a strong crossover with sectors like travel that have been hit hard by the economic slowdown and push to keep people indoors. Second, its platform has actually proven to be useful precisely in the present moment, with companies now being forced to reckon with legacy architecture and move to hybrid or all-cloud environments just to do business. And others like True Digital are specifically building contact-tracing applications on MemSQL to help address the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The company plays in a well-crowded area that includes big players like Oracle and SAP. Verma said that its tech stands apart from these because of its hybrid architecture and because it can provide speed improvements of some 30x with technology that — as we have noted before — allows users to push millions of events per day into the service while its users can query the records in real time.
It also helps to have competitive pricing. “We are a favourable alternative,” Verma said.
“This structured investment represents a significant commitment from Hercules and provides an example of the breadth of our platform and our ability to finance growth-orientated, institutionally-backed technology companies at various stages. We are impressed with the work that the MemSQL management team has accomplished operationally and excited to begin our partnership with one of the promising companies in the database market,” said Steve Kuo, senior managing director technology group head for Hercules, in a statement.
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Docket, a platform for organizing meeting agendas and notes, wins Zoom’s Marketplace App competition
In an episode of Extra Crunch Live last week, Roelof Botha expressed excitement not only about the shift to teleconference platforms like Zoom, but the apps and bots that may spring up on top of the Zoom ecosystem.
Interestingly, Zoom just announced the results of its Marketplace App competition, with Docket taking first place.
Docket was founded in January of 2019 with a mission to bring common sense to meetings. The company claims that more than 70% of meetings, both in-person and remote, happen without an agenda circulated before the meeting begins.
Docket starts from the premise that every meeting should have a prioritized, circulated agenda and then kicks it up a notch. The platform allows you to build and share that agenda, as well as take notes on meeting minutes and decisions made to share those after the fact. Docket also has a Task Manager feature, so users can share action items after the meeting to the folks that need to get things done.
Of course, Docket manages in an archive the notes, to-do lists and agendas from each respective meeting so you can go back and review the important information you need, as well as evaluate the productivity of individual meetings.
Docket integrates with Evernote, Slack and Zoom (of course). With the Docket Bot for Zoom, much of the platform’s functionality actually lives within Zoom. The agenda and recap notes appear directly in the Zoom chat, and meeting guests can take collaborative notes about the meeting without ever leaving their Zoom chat window.
Docket also retrieves the Zoom transcription and recording and attaches it directly to the respective Docket meeting as an artifact, letting you go back and search for the exact wording around a decision or meeting topic.
According to Crunchbase, Docket has $1.5 million in seed funding from startup studio High Alpha, Simon Equity Partners, Elevate Ventures and Allos Ventures. Emergence Capital, Zoom’s largest investor, invested in High Alpha in 2015.
Zoom’s Marketplace App competition was announced at Zoomtopia in October of 2019. The winner, in this case Docket, was selected by Zoom, as well as a variety of Zoom’s investors, including Emergence, Horizons Ventures, Maven Ventures and Sequoia Capital.
Docket will receive up to $2 million in funding from these venture capital orgs, as well as an advisory session with Zoom’s top product leaders. The prize also includes priority development support from Zoom, a DTEN D7 55” all-in-one interactive whiteboard with a three-year Zoom Rooms license and 10 Zoom Pro licenses for three years.
Finalists from the competition include Ambition, Bloom, Discuss.io, Friday, iScribeHealth, Pledgeling, Session, Social27 and Tiled. All the finalists received a Logitech Pro Personal Video Collaboration Kit via a Logitech sponsorship of the competition.
Editor’s Note: This post has been updated to reflect Docket’s investment from High Alpha, which itself has investment from Emergence Capital.
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Sequoia’s Roelof Botha is more optimistic about startups today than he was a year ago
“I just think change unfairly favors the startup, the nimble small company,” says Roelof Botha.
The Sequoia partner, whose portfolio includes Unity, 23andMe, Instagram, Instacart, Xoom and YouTube, says he’s hopeful about the opportunities this pandemic has created for companies across a variety of sectors, including healthcare, cloud computing, social and others.
We spoke for an hour with Botha about several topics, including how user behavior is rapidly evolving, trends he’s seeing, his outlook on economic recovery, how he’s evaluating new investments and how fundraising itself is changing. Fun fact: Sequoia has made 10 investments over Zoom since the coronavirus pandemic forced us to stay at home.
The full conversation was broadcast on YouTube, and the embed appears below.
Side note: Extra Crunch Live is our new virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members. Folks can ask their own questions live during the chat, with guests that include Aileen Lee, Kirsten Green, Mark Cuban and many, many more. You can check out the schedule here.
Below, you’ll find a lightly edited transcript of our recent chat with Botha. Enjoy!
The differences in fundraising based on stage
When you’re listening to a seed-stage company, it’s often about the story. The founders paint a vision of the future. That’s part of what I love about my job, by the way. You’re sitting there and you’re trying to imagine what the world is going to look like one day and whether this company is on the right side of history. Or is it implausible that this will happen? It’s so much fun to sit there and think about that. At the seed stage, it’s about the story.
As you get to a Series A or Series B stage, the company will definitely start to have some metrics: usage numbers, early adoption numbers. If it’s an enterprise company, what are people willing to pay for your product? You start to get a sense of the metrics that back up the story. If the metrics don’t support the story, then you start to wonder if that company makes sense. In the long run, you need to have financials that flow from the metrics. But that’s typically at a Series C or later stage. And clearly, by the time a company goes public, you need to have connected story to metrics to financials.
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Startups Weekly: SEC temporarily loosens crowdfunding regulations on small companies
Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use every Saturday morning by email (7am PT). Subscribe here.
A specific type of small startup has a window to raise crowdfunding in a somewhat less regulated way than normally required in the U.S., based on a temporary set of rule changes by the Securities and Exchange Commission announced this week. Excited yet?
The new terms are generally geared towards the millions of mom-and-pop businesses that were the intended recipients of the PPP grants, who did not actually receive those grants as needed, as Jon Shieber covered on TechCrunch this week. However, this grim fall-back measure to stave off disaster for a key part of the economy is also a way for small startups to start creating jobs a little faster, potentially. One of the main adjustments: if you’re looking to raise between $107,000 and $250,000, you don’t need to have your financial statements reviewed first by an outside auditor. Instead, the SEC says you just need “[f]inancial statements of the issuer and certain information from the issuer’s Federal income tax returns, both certified by the principal executive officer.”
The catch is you still have to follow a long list of other do’s and don’ts provided by the SEC, such as being in business least six months prior, and clear disclosures to investors about your financial reliance on this “relief.” The temporary permissiveness is set to expire by August 31.
Investors bet big on robotic automation during the pandemic
Automation will happen at an even more foundational level than one might guess as supply chains try to resolve huge new types of kinks. Here’s how Shahin Farshchi of Lux Capital describes it, in a sample from one of our investor surveys on Extra Crunch this week.
COVID-19 revealed that our just-in-time manufacturing and logistics infrastructure cannot react to unexpected change. We expect the best practices of tech companies: rapidly adopting new tools and quickly iterating on their products and processes to become common in the realm of manufacturing and logistics. Engineers will be handed credit cards to try the latest tools, building on open source will be widely embraced, and making bets on products from startups will become the norm in this industry which has its roots in the industrial revolution.
Where are the opportunities? Here’s DCVC’s Kelly Chen:
Despite the storm, we are optimistic about a number of things:
- As the crisis spotlighted, global supply chains are a delicate balance of factors that can easily be disrupted. In addition to growing labor costs, regulatory uncertainty, and higher international shipping costs, we believe companies will increasingly innovate on domestic manufacturing channels. “Bring manufacturing home” is a cry reverberating across many industries in many countries.
- Online commodity retail is finally getting a kick in the tail. Last year, 4% of groceries were ordered online. In a recent large survey after COVID-19, a third of respondents ordered groceries online, many for the first time. The traditional two-day delivery will benefit, but we think momentum will shift to micro-fulfillment, where large hubs will service distributed local warehouses that are much closer to the customer, auto-fulfilling orders within hours.
- Separate from fulfillment, we believe the hundreds of thousands of new manual delivery jobs will endure. We predict it will be years before tech allows for scalable automated door-to-door delivery.
- As employers explore tech to automate labor in tough times, they find that humans are incredibly difficult to replace. At DCVC, we like tech that automates the kind of tasks that could never be done at human scale — things that scale the value of human skills, not replace them.
We also published a survey on media startup investing this week, and another on gaming technology infrastructure.
The benefits of a commercial real estate collapse in SF
Full-time CTO and long-time TechCrunch columnist Jon Evans has a fun muse for any reader who is looking to stay in the Bay Area and also pay less for housing. What is going to happen to all of the commercial real estate that is getting rendered obsolete as many companies go big on remote? Presumably a lot more housing stock. Here’s a taste of the full thing over on TechCrunch:
Consider San Francisco, everyone’s favorite overpriced, overcrowded, inequality poster child. It has roughly 150 million square feet of combined office and retail space at the moment. If the COVID-19 lockdown-then-recession eventually eats 20% of that — which is plausible between the retailpocalypse and what I will christen the “officepocalypse,” i.e. the revealed cost savings of working from home — that’s 30 million square feet of empty space.
If converted to housing, this could increase the city’s total housing stock by well over 10%. That would drive prices and rents, already pressured by the recession, way down — while presumably still remaining simultaneously profitable, since current prices are so high. Needless to say this conversion would also create a lot of jobs. (Although, in some cases, no conversion will be required.)
The rebirth of the vertical B2B marketplace startup
It was one of those seemingly guaranteed winners of the dot-com bubble, that got torched along with most other ideas around back then. Today, marketplaces for businesses in complex supply chains are back in vogue, Shieber writes for Extra Crunch this week. The original thesis was that “thousands of small businesses were making specialized products consumed by larger businesses in huge industries, but the reach of smaller players was limited by their dependence on a sales structure built on conferences and personal interactions.”
The opportunity has been clarified over the course of the past decade.
The first sign of life for the directory model came with the success of GoodRX back in 2011. The company proved that when information about pricing in a previously opaque industry becomes available, it can unleash a torrent of new demand.
“GoodRX did this to huge success,” said Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, who invested in Knowde, a marketplace that follows a similar model. “The idea of crawling the public internet and creating structured data and winning SEO or doing SEO for the first time for something so you get a lot of traffic from buyers so you have something to offer sellers so you can get the sellers to cooperate with you… that playbook can be taken to many different industries.”
Across the week
TechCrunch:
This early Facebook investor wants to find smart students a job at the next Facebook
We need more video games that are social platforms first, games second
Tech for good during COVID-19: Sky-high gifts, extra help and chips
Data shows which tech roles might be most vulnerable amid layoffs
Latin America Roundup: Big rounds, big mergers and a $3.8M pandemic fund from Nubank
Extra Crunch:
AR is the answer to plummeting retail sales during lockdown
TechCrunch’s top 16 picks from Techstars April virtual demo days
Longtime VC Todd Chaffee of IVP says late-stage scene is now ‘M&A world’
As private investment cools, enterprise startups may try tapping corporate dollars
Around TechCrunch
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Hear how to build a sales team at Disrupt SF 2020
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#EquityPod
From Alex Wilhelm:
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Every week we write this post with some opening line akin to wow, what a week, huh? This is yet another one of those weeks. Perhaps this is just life now, and every week will stretch before us, similar to what Gandalf said after killing that Balrog, that “every day was as long as the life age of the Earth.”
Anyhoo, we recorded Equity to try and make a little sense of the week as there was a lot going on. So, Natasha, Danny, and Alex once again gathered to parse it all. Here’s a rough digest of the topics from this episode:
- Techstars’ virtual demo days. Natasha and Alex are listening in to as many Techstars virtual demo confabs as they can along with other TC staff, pulling out favorites as we go. Today we dug into what is working, and what isn’t with virtual demo days.
- While VC Twitter might make it seem like every firm is open for business, that is not the reality. We talk about signaling risk, external signs a firm is investing, and throw pro rata chat around in between.
- Peanut, a social network for women, raised $12 million and that is the good news we needed this week. Think of it as a better, cleaner and more intimate version of your favorite Facebook group. About 1.6 million are on the platform.
- Every Mother raised a small sum to bring safety and community to pre and post natal workouts for mothers.
- Robinhood’s Series F. The new Robinhood round values the company at around $8.3 billion, a huge number but one that wasn’t as high as we might have expected, given how much its valuation used to grow between new funding events.
- Airbnb cut 1,900 people in a devastating round of layoffs for the travel and hospitality company. We discuss o-founder and CEO Brian Chesky’s detailed blogpost about the cuts, and whether it is better to be a public or a private company during this pandemic.
- Uber cut staff this week, and pumped money into a massive Lime downround that may see it offload its own micromobility business onto the smaller company. Not a good week for Uber, not a good week for Lime.
We didn’t get to chat API funding rounds or the unicorn retreat, or even really riff on earnings. There’s so much going on! But, we’ll be back Monday morning so sit tight.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 AM PT and Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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This Week in Apps: WWDC goes online, Android 11 delays, Facebook SDK turns into app kill switch
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 3 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 continuing to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting the world of mobile applications, including the latest on countries’ various contact-tracing apps, the pandemic’s impact on gaming and fintech and more. We’re also looking at that big app crash caused by Facebook, plus new app releases from Facebook and Google, Android 11’s new timeline and Apple’s plans to move WWDC online, among other things.
Headlines
WWDC goes virtual June 22
Apple announced this week its plans for a virtual version of its Worldwide Developer Conference. The company will host its WWDC 2020 event beginning on June 22 in the Apple Developer app and on the Apple Developer website for free for all developers.
It will be interesting to see how successfully Apple is able to take its developer conference online. After all, developers could already access the sessions and keynotes through videos — but the real power of the event was in the networking and being able to talk to Apple engineers, ask questions, get hands-on help and see how other developers are using Apple technologies to innovate. Unless Apple is planning a big revamp of its developer site and app that would enable those connections, it seems this year’s event will lack some of WWDC’s magic.
The company also announced the Swift Student Challenge, an opportunity for student developers to showcase their coding by creating their own Swift playground.
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