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HubSpot adds customer service tools to its marketing platform
HubSpot is expanding beyond sales and marketing with the official launch of its Service Hub for managing customer service.
The product was first announced last fall, but now it’s moved out of beta testing.
HubSpot President and COO JD Sherman said this was a logical next step for the company. He argued that the Internet has “democratized” the ability of businesses to attract customers by creating their own content (using tools like HubSpot’s, natch), and while “that opportunity still exists, frankly, it’s getting harder due to the sheer volume of what’s going on.”
“It makes sense to take care of your customer,” Sherman said — both to keep them loyal and also to turn them into an advocate who might help you attract new customers.
Service Hub General Manager Michael Redbord and Go To Market Leader David Barron gave me a quick tour of the Service Hub. It includes an universal inbox for all your customer communications, a bot-builder to automate some of those customer interactions, tools for building a company knowledge base (which can then be fed into the bot-builder, which Redbord described as a more “customer-centric” way to present your content), tools for creating surveys and a dashboard to track how your service team is doing.
Redbord said he previously worked on HubSpot’s own service and support team, so every feature in ServiceHub has “a one-to-one relationship” with an issue that HubSpot has faced, or that he personally has faced, while trying to support customers.
Barron added that ServiceHub benefits from being integrated with HubSpot’s existing products, allowing businesses to track their interactions with a customer across sales, marketing and support.
“We’re a platform company,” he said. “When any of these conversations happens, whether it’s a chat with a human or a chat with a bot, that’s all logged on [a single record] in HubSpot, so there’s no data leakage between different teams.”
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Wes Blackwell joins Scout Ventures to invest in early-stage, veteran-led startups
We haven’t written much about Scout Ventures, but the New York City-based firm has built up a big portfolio over nearly a decade of investing, with exits like Olapic (acquired by Monotype for $130 million) and Kanvas (acquired by TechCrunch’s parent company AOL).
And, it’s done all of this with just one full-time partner, Bradley C. Harrison — until recently, when the firm brought on Wes Blackwell as partner.
Blackwell is an advisor to Washington, D.C. startup studio DataTribe and previously led enterprise implementation, account management and tech support at LiveSafe. And like Harrison (who graduated from West Point and served in the Army for five years), Blackwell is a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces, having spent more than a decade flying helicopters in the Navy.
“If you’d asked me five years ago if I would have partnered with an Annapolis Navy brat, the answer would have been an unequivocal no,” Harrison said. But he said that as he and Blackwell started spending more time together, he realized that their backgrounds were complementary: “It made all the sense in the world.”
And the Armed Forces background isn’t just another line in their bios — Harrison said that about half of the companies that Scout has invested in were founded by veterans.
“We don’t find a lot of competition in this stuff,” he explained. “It’s a pretty tight community.”
Scout typically writes initial checks of between $500,000 and $750,000 and aims to take a stake of around 10 percent. And while Harrison has been the only full-time partner until now, the firm has a team that also includes several venture partners and Principal Brendan Syron.
“Like any good investors, our thesis evolves over time,” Syron told me. He said the firm has become increasingly interested in frontier technology, with investments its “core sectors” of AI, machine learning, autonomy and mobility, and “a big focus” on data and cybersecurity — an area where Blackwell has strong connections.
“Some of folks in this industry, by their nature, they’re not very trusting,” Blackwell said. “So by virtue of Brad and I’s background and character, there’s a trust factor there.”
Blackwell has already made his first investment as part of Scout, leading a $1.5 million round in DeepSig, a startup working to improve wireless technology by applying deep learning to radio signal data.
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Cleveland offered $120 million in freebies lure Amazon to the city
A Cleveland.com article detailed the lengths the small midwestern city would go to lure Amazon’s in 50,000-person HQ2. In a document obtained by reporter Mark Naymik, we learn that Cleveland was ready to give over $120 million in free services to Amazon including considerably reduced fares on Cleveland-area trains and buses.
The document, available here, focuses on the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA)’s ideas regarding the key component in many of Amazon’s decisions – transportation.
Ohio has a budding but often tendentious connection to public transport. Cities like Columbus have no light rail while Cincinnati just installed a rudimentary system. Cleveland, for its part, has a solid if underused system already in place.
That the city would offer discounts is not surprising. Cities were falling over themselves to gain what many would consider – including Amazon itself – a costly incursion on the city chosen. However, given the perceived importance of having Amazon land in a small city – including growth of the startup and tech ecosystems – you can see why Cleveland would want to give away plenty of goodies.
Ultimately the American Midwest is at a crossroads. It could go either way, with small cities growing into vibrant artistic and creative hubs or those same cities falling into further decline. And the odds are stacked against them.
The biggest city, Chicago, is a transport, finance, and logistics hub and draws talent from smaller cities that orbit it. Further, “smart” cities like Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor steal the brightest students who go on to the coasts after graduation. As Richard Florida noted, the cities with a vibrant Creative Class are often the ones that succeed in this often rigged race and many cities just can’t generate any sort of creative ecosystem – cultural or otherwise – that could support a behemoth like Amazon landing in its midst.
What Cleveland did wasn’t wrong. However, it did work hard to keep the information secret, a consideration that could be dangerous. After all, as Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete K. Rahn told reporters: “Our statement for HQ2 is we’ll provide whatever is necessary to Amazon when they need it. For all practical purposes, it’s a blank check.”
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Why Snapchat’s re-redesign will fail and how to fix it
Snap screwed it all up jumbling messages and Stories, banishing creators to Discover and wrecking auto-advance. Prideful of his gut instincts, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel refused to listen to the awful user reviews and declining usage. Now a YouGov study shows a 73 percent drop in user sentiment toward Snapchat, the app’s user count shrank in March and its share price is way down.
Yet the re-redesign Snapchat is finally rolling out today in response won’t fix the problems. The company still fails to understand that people want a predictable app that’s convenient to lay back and watch, and social media stars are more similar to you and me than they are to news outlets producing mobile magazine-style Discover content.
There’s a much better path for Snapchat, but it will require an ego adjustment and a bigger reversal of the changes — philosophy be damned.
Snapchat’s impression amongst US users fell off a cliff when the redesign was rolled out early this year
Here’s what Snapchat was, is becoming and should be.
The old Snapchat
Snapchat’s best design was in September 2016. It lacked sensible Stories sorting, and got some questionable changes before the big January 2018 redesign, but the fundamentals were there:
- Left: Messages in reverse chronological order
- Right: Stories from everyone in reverse chronological order with a carousel of ranked preview tiles in a carousel above or below Stories
- Auto-Advance: Automatic and instant
The broken Snapchat
Snapchat’s big January 2018 redesign did two smart things. It added more obvious navigation buttons to ease in new and adult users. And it made the Stories list algorithmically sorted so you’d see your best friends first rather than just who posts most often, as TechCrunch recommended last April.
But it introduced a bunch of other problems, like pulling creators out of the Stories list, turning the inbox into chaos with ad-laden Stories and breaking auto-advance so you have to watch an annoying interstitial between each friend. Spiegel stubbornly refused to listen to the poor feedback, saying in February, “Even the complaints we’re seeing reinforce the philosophy. Even the frustrations we’re seeing really validate those changes. It’ll take time for people to adjust.” That quickly proved short-sighted.
- Left: Messages and Stories from friends mixed together, sorted algorithmically
- Right: Discover, sorted algorithmically, with influencers and people who don’t follow you back mixed in
- Auto-Advance: Interstitial preview screens
The re-redesigned Snapchat
Users hated the redesign, initial reviews were mostly negative and Snapchat’s growth fell to its lowest rate ever. After some tests, today Snapchat tells us it’s rolling out the re-redesign to the majority of iOS users that’s a little less confusing. Yet it doesn’t address the core problems, plus makes the Discover screen more overwhelming:
- Left: Messages sorted reverse chronologically
- Right: Friends’ Stories at the top sorted algorithmically [Correction: Not chronologically], then subscriptions to creators sorted algorithmically, then Discover channels sorted algorithmically
- Auto-Advance: Interstitial preview screens in Stories but not Subscriptions or For You
The right Snapchat
While the re-redesign makes Snapchat’s messaging inbox work like it used to, it overloads the Discover screen and leaves auto-advance broken out of a misguided hope of ensuring you never watch a frenemy or ex’s Story by accident and show up in their view counts. But that’s not worth ruining the laid-back viewing experience we’ve grown to love on Instagram Stories, and could be better solved with a mute button or just getting people to unfriend those they can’t be seen watching.
That’s why I recommend Snapchat move to a hybrid of all its designs:
- Left: Messages sorted reverse chronologically
- Right: Stories from all friends and creators, displayed as preview tiles, sorted algorithmically to preference close friends
- Further Right: Discover, with preview tile sections for subscriptions, publishers and Our Stories/Maps/Events [This whole screen could be crammed into the Stories page if Snap insisted on just one screen on the right]
- Auto-Advance: Traditional instant auto-advance without interstitials, plus a mute button to hide people
This design would make the inbox natural and uncluttered, ensure you see all your closest friends’ Stories, keep influencers from being buried in Discover, give publishers and Snapchat’s own content recommendations, including new creators, room to breathe and let you easily relax and watch a ton of Stories in a row.
Snapchat could have slowly iterated its way to this conclusion. It could have done extensive beta testing of each change to ensure it didn’t misstep. And perhaps facing an existential crisis from the exceedingly viable alternatives Instagram and WhatsApp, it should never have attempted a sweeping overhaul of its app’s identity. Twitter’s conservative approach to product updates looks wiser in retrospect. Instead, Snap is in decline.
Facebook’s family of apps have survived over the years by changing so gradually that they never shocked users into rebellion, or executing major redesigns when users had no comparable app to switch to. Snapchat calls itself a camera company, but it’s really a “cool” company — powered by the perception of its trendiness with American kids. But as ephemeral content proliferates and Stories become a ubiquitous standard soon to surpass feeds as the preferred way to share, they’ve gone from hip to utility. So if its features aren’t cool any more and are offered in a slicker way to a larger audience elsewhere, what is Snapchat anymore?
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LightTag is a text annotation platform for data scientists creating AI training data
LightTag, a newly launched startup from a former NLP researcher at Citi, has built a “text annotation platform” designed to assist data scientists who need to quickly create training data for their AI systems. It’s a classic picks ‘n’ shovels move, in that the bootstrapped Berlin-based company is hoping to take advantage of the current boom in AI development.
Specifically, LightTag aims to solve one of the main bottlenecks of ‘deep learning’-based AI development: what you get out is only as good as the labeled data you put in. The problem, however, is that labelling data is laborious, and since it’s a job carried out by teams of humans it is prone to inaccuracy and inconsistency. LightTag’s team-based workflow, clever UI, and in-built quality controls is an attempt to mitigate this.
“What I’ve taken from [my previous positions] to LightTag is an understanding that labeled data is more important to success in machine learning than clever algorithms,” says founder Tal Perry. “The difference in a successful machine learning project often boiled down to how well the gathering and use of labeled data was executed and managed. There is a huge gap in the tooling to consistently do that well, that’s why I built LightTag”.
Perry says LightTag’s annotation interface is designed to keep labellers “effective and engaged”. It also employs its own “AI” to learn from previous labelling and make annotation suggestions. The platform also automates the work of managing a project, in terms of assigning tasks to labellers and making sure there is enough overlap and duplication to keep accuracy and consistency high.
“We’ve made it dead-simple to annotate with a team (sounds obvious, but nothing else makes it easy),” he says. “To make sure the data is good, LightTag automatically assigns work to team members so that there is overlap between them. This allows project managers to measure agreement and recognise problems in their project early on. For example, if a specific annotator is performing worse than others”.
Meanwhile, Perry says acquiring labeled data is one of the silent growth sectors in the recent AI boom, but for many sector-specific industries, such as medical, legal or financial, outsourcing the job is not an option. That’s because the data is often too sensitive, or too specialist for non-subject experts to process. To address this, LightTag offers an on-premise version in addition to SaaS.
“Every company has huge text datasets that are unstructured (CRM records, call transcripts, emails etc). ‘Deep Learning’ has made it algorithmically feasible to tap that data, but to use Deep Learning we need to train the model with labeled datasets. Most companies can’t outsource labelling on text because the data is too complicated (biology, finance), regulated (CRM records) or both (medical records),” explains the LightTag founder.
Operating in various pilots and in private beta since December 2018, and publicly launched this month, LightTag has already been used by the data science team at a large Silicon Valley tech company that wants its AI to understand free-form text in profiles, as well as by an energy company to analyse logs from oil rigs to predict problems drilling at certain depths. The startup has also done a pilot with a medical imaging company labelling reports associated with MRI scans.
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Xiaomi is bringing its smart home devices to the US — but still no phones yet
Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker that’s looking to raise as much as $10 billion in a Hong Kong IPO, is continuing to grow its presence in the American market after it announced plans to bring its smart home products to the U.S..
The company is best known for its well-priced and quality smartphones, but Xiaomi offers hundreds of other products which range from battery chargers to smart lights, air filter units and even Segway. On the sidelines of Google I/O, the company quietly made a fairly significant double announcement: not only will it bring its smart home products to the U.S., but it is adding support for Google Assistant, too.
The first products heading Stateside include the Mi Bedside Lamp, Mi LED Smart Bulb and Mi Smart Plug, Xiaomi’s head of international Wan Xiang said, but you can expect plenty more to follow. Typically, Xiaomi sells to consumers in the U.S. via Amazon and also its Mi.com local store, so keep an eye out there.
Xiaomi just announced during #io8 that our smart home products will work with the Google Assistant. The initial selection of compatible products includes Mi Bedside Lamp, Mi LED Smart Bulb and Mi Smart Plug, which will be coming to the U.S soon! https://t.co/f65lj2jNej pic.twitter.com/nEXMiIyyZ8
— Wang Xiang (@XiangW_) May 10, 2018
Smartphones, however, are a different question.
Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun — who stands to become China’s richest man thanks to the IPO — previously said the company is looking to bring its signature phones to the U.S. by early 2019 at the latest.
There’s no mention of that in Xiaomi’s IPO prospectus, which instead talks of plans to move into more parts of Europe and double down on Russia and Southeast Asia. Indeed, earlier this week, Xiaomi announced plans to expand beyond Spain and into France and Italy in Europe, while it has also inked a carrier deal with Hutchinson that will go beyond those markets into the UK and other places.
You can expect that it will take its time in the U.S., particularly given the concerns around Chinese OEMs like Huawei — which has been blacklisted by carriers — and ZTE, which has had its telecom equipment business clamped down on by the U.S. government.
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FCC slaps robocaller with record $120M fine, but it’s like ’emptying the ocean with a teaspoon’
Whoever thought we would leave telemarketing behind in this brave new smartphone world of ours lacked imagination. Robocalls are a menace growing in volume and even a massive $120 million fine leveled against a prominent source of them by the FCC likely won’t stem the flood.
The fine was announced today during the FCC’s monthly open meeting: a Mr Adrian Abramovich was responsible for nearly 100 million robocalls over a three-month period, and will almost certainly be bankrupted by this record forfteiture.
“Our decision sends a loud and clear message,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in a statement. “This FCC is an active cop on the beat and will throw the book at anyone who violates our spoofing and robocall rules and harms consumers.”
That sounds impressive until you hear that these calls took place in 2016, and meanwhile there were 3.4 billion robocalls made last month alone. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel applauds the fine, but questions the practicality of pursuing damages when actions need to be taken to prevent the crimes in the first place.
“Let’s be honest,” she wrote in a statement, “Going after a single bad actor is emptying the ocean with a teaspoon.”
She points out that a set of rules designed to prevent robocalls was overturned a couple months ago, and that 20 petitions to the FCC under those rules for legal exemptions and such have yet to be addressed. And a technology designed to prevent robocalls altogether, recommended in a report more than a year ago and currently set to be implemented in Canada in 2019, has no such date here in the States.
As someone who gets these robocalls all the time, I fully support both this fine and the more serious measures Rosenworcel suggests. And the faster the better, I literally got one while writing this story.
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Nintendo’s $20 charging stand finally fixes the Switch’s kickstand problem
Versatility has also been on of the Switch’s best features. The latest Nintendo system is a fascinating hybrid device that skirts the line between home and portable gaming. Still, there are some in-between scenarios the console didn’t get quite right out of the box.
The kickstand problem has plagued the otherwise well-received device since its earliest days. It falls over often, it’s puts the device at a weird angle, and worst of all, the charging port is on the bottom, so you can’t play the system in table top mode while it’s plugged it.
Just ahead of E3, the company’s showing off a $20 solution. The simply named Adjustable Charging Stand props the system, while keeping it plugged in, via an AC adapter port on the side.
An adjustable kickstand on the back, meanwhile, means you can change the viewing angle, depending on the height of the surface it’s on. That’s good news for those times when you don’t have a TV set to plug into, but still want to pull out the Joy-Cons to get the full experience — be it on a desk or an airport tray table.
The peripheral hits stores July 13.
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Tailor Brands raises $15.5M for AI-driven logo creation and more
Tailor Brands, a startup that automates parts of the branding and marketing process for small businesses, announced this morning that it has raised $15.5 million in Series B funding.
CEO Yali Saar has said the company sits at the intersection of design and machine learning. The idea is to create technology that understands the best practices of logo design, copywriting and social media strategy.
It’s the automated design that’s most immediately eye-catching, and that’s the big feature highlighted on the Tailor Brands website. You’ll need to pay to get access to high-quality image files, but before that, you can actually try creating a logo for free, just by entering some basic information about your company and identifying the designs you prefer.
Related: What do you guys think of the new TechCrunch logo?
Tailor Brands, which launched at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in 2014, said the technology has already been used to create 45 million logos. The company says it had 3.86 million customers last year, and is adding half a million new businesses to the platform each month.
The new funding was led by Pitango Venture Capital Growth Fund and British Armat Group, with participation from Disruptive Technologies and Mangrove Capital Partners. The company has now raised a total of $20.6 million and says it will use the money to expand globally, add more languages and introduce more tools to its full branding suite.
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Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, now lets you pay ‘Nearby Friends’
Monzo, one of a plethora of U.K. fintech startups aiming to re-invent current account banking, has launched a new feature that makes it even more frictionless to transfer money to friends. Dubbed ‘Nearby Friends’, the new geolocation functionality uses Bluetooth to let you see anyone else that uses Monzo who is nearby so that you can initiate a payment without needing their phone number to be in your contact book first.
One of the ways Monzo has increased its virality from the get-go is by making friend-to-friend payments easy, either to people who already bank with the startup, or via the Monzo.me service, which gives users a payment link to share with friends. The idea, as Monzo co-founder often explains, is that unlike traditional incumbent banks that basically have zero network effects (perhaps beyond joint accounts), the challenger bank is designed to become more useful the more people who join it.
Revolut has a similar feature called ‘Near Me’
“Thanks to the magic of Bluetooth, you can see anyone else that uses Monzo nearby. To protect people’s privacy, you’ll only find people who also have the feature open at the same time. With just a couple of taps, you can send people money, without the need to swap numbers or do any other admin,” writes Andy Smart, iOS Platform Lead at Monzo, on the company’s blog.
Under the hood, Monzo’s ‘Nearby Friends’ uses Google Nearby, Google’s peer-to-peer networking API that allows apps to “easily discover, connect to, and exchange data with nearby devices in real-time, regardless of network connectivity”. Specifically, here is how Monzo says its implementation works:
- When you open Nearby Friends, we send an anonymous token (a random string of text) to Google
- That token is broadcast via Bluetooth to devices nearby
- At the same time, your Monzo app starts searching for other devices near you
- When your Monzo app discovers a device nearby, it receives the device’s token. Using the Monzo API, it exchanges that token for your friend’s name and profile picture
- We also receive an identifier which we can use to work out who to make the payment to
The token does not identify you personally outside of Monzo’s systems, which means we don’t share any of your personal information with third parties during the process. The token we send to Google expires after a short period of time, meaning your personal data is unidentifiable.
Meanwhile, competitor Revolut recently — and relatively quietly by its standards — rolled out a very similar feature, as it is wont to do. Called ‘Near Me’, I understand it will be formally unannounced in a company blog post as soon as tomorrow and is another clear sign of how fast the $1.7B valued banking startup is moving.
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