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Dolo delivers on the Foursquare prophecy of hyper-local tips
Dolo is the kindness of strangers as an app. Where’s the prettiest place in the park? What’s the best thing on the menu? How do I skip the line? Dolo lets you leave helpful suggestions for anyone nearby. The new social app launches out of beta today to augment the world with serendipitous tips from strangers. Built by two ex-Apple employees and backed with pre-seed funding from Floodgate, Dolo could reveal the secrets and potential friends hidden in the ether around us.
Like any new social app, Dolo will have a steep uphill climb to user growth. There are also apps like Foursquare, guide books like Lonely Planet and social networks like Facebook and its Recommendations feature to compete with. But they’re often bloated, outdated or unfocused. Dolo hopes to build a new community around turning the whole world into a bulletin board.
“If you take the construct of a cocktail party or a neighborhood bar, people feel more naturally ‘allowed’ to just mingle, eavesdrop, start a conversation or even meet someone new,” says Dolo co-founder and CEO Raja Haddad. “In larger spaces (a park, a neighborhood, a city), there are no vehicles today that allow such frictionless, comfortable, fun socializing.” That means a local expert’s knowledge ends up trapped while tourists and first-timers wander aimlessly.
Haddad and co-founder Benjamin Vigier met when they joined Apple in 2010 and worked on its Apple Store App before Haddad move on to Apple Watch marketing and Vigier helped develop Apple Pay. They later met Andy Mai at Coachella, who grew the Men’s Fashion Advice subreddit to more than a million users. Together they set out “to enable serendipitous ways for people to socialize with other people around them, regardless of their pre-existing social bubbles.”
Dolo’s iOS and Android apps are now open everywhere, but it’s currently focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area, where it centered its 4,000-user beta. The app starts with a feed of the closest tips that automatically re-sort as you move around. Anyone can post that “I need some info or a favor,” “folks need to know this,” “I’m proposing an event,” or “just chatter and banter.” For example, my first contribution was that you can skip the line at famously overpopulated ice cream shop Bi-Rite Creamery by walking down the block to its soft-serve froyo window near SF’s Dolores Park.
That popular hipster picnic spot is actually where Dolo gets its name. And no, it’s not the same as the now defunct “bespoke app” called Dolo from 2013 that just helped you locate your friends in that park.
I was impressed by Dolo’s approach to safety and moderation that other anonymous and hyper-local apps like Yik Yak and Secret neglected until bullying led to their demise. You can use your real name or a pseudonym on Dolo, and choose a pixelated filter or mask sticker to obscure your face from the public. But then if you connect as friends with someone on the app, “the masks come off,” Haddad says, and your profile’s bio is revealed. Meanwhile, users are empowered to moderate comments on their own posts by getting alerted to flags that Dolo reviews too. And all photos get reviewed by a crowdsourced moderation service.
Dolo smartly plans to “focus on achieving density versus going directly for top-line scale,” Haddad explains. That mirrors Facebook’s growth strategy that tried to get lots of users at specific colleges or locations so they don’t enter a ghost town, rather than immediately striving for global scale. It’s already raised $680,000 in a pre-seed round a year ago, but will try to raise a seed round early this summer. It hopes to put that cash into product development, and marketing activations at colleges and public places in the fall.
Advertisers might be keen to reach potential customers when they’re super close-by and looking for local information. But that will require plenty of users, as well as a tough-to-scale local ads sales team. Haddad admits, “It’s obviously very challenging to get a social platform off the ground, particularly one that relies on location and density.”
Nextdoor has at least proven that people are interested in local info, given it’s active in 160,000 neighborhoods. The question is if an app designed to alert you to what’s around you anywhere, rather than just close to home, will have the same legs. Dolo will also have to outlast specialized apps like Wildfire for celebrity sightings and safety alerts, Citizen for crime mapping and Hive Social for interest-based communities.
It’s somewhat depressing, but an app like Facebook that already has ubiquity, frequent use and local ad relationships might be better equipped to build this product than a startup. Dolo will have to figure out how to make adding and observing tips a constant enough behavior that users don’t forget about it.
But at least Dolo isn’t burdened by a hundred other features crowding out the local recommendations for attention, nor is it constrained by relying on your existing friend graph. A dedicated app for the insights of passersby holds the promise of not only illuminating what’s around us, but also mending our polarized society.
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Rocketrip raises $15 million to reward cost-saving employees
If your company lets you expense the nicest hotel when you travel, why wouldn’t you?
But what if you got to split the savings with your employer by selecting a less expensive hotel?
A New York-based startup called Rocketrip believes most employees will opt to save companies money if they are incentivized to do so. It’s built an enterprise platform that rewards employees with gift cards if they go under budget on travel and transportation.
After five years of signing up business clients like Twitter and Pandora, Rocketrip is raising $15 million in Series C funding led by GV (Google Ventures) to keep expanding. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Canaan Partners are also in the round.
Inspired by Google’s internal travel system, Rocketrip CEO Dan Ruch calls his solution a “behavioral change platform.” Employees “always optimize for self-preservation, self-interest,” and are likely to book a cheaper flight if it means a gift card at a place like Amazon, Bloomingdale’s or Home Depot, Ruch claims. He said that the average business trip booked by Rocketrip saves companies $208.
Ruch believes that Rocketrip has built a currency that motivates teams. He says some employees even gift Rocketrip points to congratulate colleagues on birthdays and promotions.
When it comes to enterprise platforms, Rocketrip is “one of those unique situations where everyone is really excited to use it,” said Canaan Partners’ Michael Gilroy, who holds a board seat.
Yet Rocketrip is not the only startup looking to help employees make money by cutting on costs. TripActions and TravelBank have also created similar businesses.
Gilroy insists that “Rocketrip was first” and that he views the others a “validation of the model.”
Rocketrip hopes to someday expand beyond travel to incentivize healthcare choices, like quitting smoking. It also thinks companies will use Rocketrip points to reward employees for community service. “Any time we can motivate an employee,” there’s an opportunity for Rocketrip, Ruch believes.
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Google Cloud expands its bet on managed database services
Google announced a number of updates to its cloud-based database services today. For the most part, we’re not talking about any groundbreaking new products here, but all of these updates address specific pain points that enterprises suffer when they move to the cloud.
As Google Director of Product Management Dominic Preuss told me ahead of today’s announcements, Google long saw itself as a thought leader in the database space. For the longest time, though, that thought leadership was all about things like the Bigtable paper and didn’t really manifest itself in the form of products. Projects like the globally distributed Cloud Spanner database are now allowing Google Cloud to put its stamp on this market.
Preuss also noted that many of Google’s enterprise users often start with lifting and shifting their existing workloads to the cloud. Once they have done that, though, they are also looking to launch new applications in the cloud — and at that point, they typically want managed services that free them from having to do the grunt work of managing their own infrastructure.
Today’s announcements mostly fit into this mold of offering enterprises the kind of managed database services they are asking for.
The first of these is the beta launch of Cloud Memorystore for Redis, a fully managed in-memory data store for users who need in-memory caching for capacity buffering and similar use cases.
Google is also launching a new feature for Cloud Bigtable, the company’s NoSQL database service for big data workloads. Bigtable now features regional replication (or at least it will, once this has rolled out to all users within the next week or so). The general idea here is to give enterprises that previously used Cassandra for their on-premises workloads an alternative in the Google Cloud portfolio, and these cross-zone replications increase the availability and durability of the data they store in the service.
With this update, Google is also making Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL generally available with a 99.95 percent SLA, and it’s adding commit timestamps to Cloud Spanner.
What’s next for Google’s database portfolio? Unsurprisingly, Preuss wouldn’t say, but he did note that the company wants to help enterprises move as many of their workloads to the cloud as they can — and for the most part, that means managed services.
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Drew Houston to upload his thoughts at TC Disrupt SF in September
Dropbox is a critically important tool for more than 500 million people, which is why we’re so excited to have founder and CEO Drew Houston on the Disrupt stage in September.
Dropbox launched back in 2007 and Houston has spent the last decade growing Dropbox to the behemoth it is today.
During that time, Houston has made some tough decisions.
A few years ago, Houston decided to move the Dropbox infrastructure off of AWS. In 2014, Houston chose to raise $500 million in debt financing to keep up pace with Box, which was considering an IPO at the time. And in March 2017, Dropbox took another $600 million in debt financing from JP Morgan.
Houston also reportedly turned down a nine-figure acquisition offer from Apple.
All the while, Houston led Dropbox to be cash-flow positive and grew the company to see a $1 billion revenue run rate as of last year.
And, of course, we can’t forget the decision to go public earlier this year.
Interestingly, Houston first told his story to a TechCrunch audience at TC50 in 2008 as part of the Startup Battlefield. In fact, you can check out the original pitch from TC50 right here.
At Disrupt SF in September, we’re excited to sit down with Houston to discuss his journey thus far, the decision to go public and the future of Dropbox.
The show runs from September 5 to September 7, and for the next week, our super early-bird tickets are still available.
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Snapchat launches AR selfie games called Snappables
Snapchat wants to let you play its augmented reality Lenses, not just play dress-up. Today it launched Snappables — AR games that use your touch, motion and facial expressions to compete for high scores or in literal head-to-head multiplayer match-ups. Snappables live alongside Snapchat’s other Lenses and are rolling out globally this week. New games will be released each week, while favorites will stick around.
These are Snapchat’s first collaborative or shared Lenses that let you interact with another friend on their own phone, which could create new opportunities for the app in the future. Some of the first Snappables previewed by Snapchat include an Asteroids-style space shooter, a bubble gum popping contest, a weight lifting one you play by straining your forehead, a kiss-blowing game, an egg catching competition and a dance party.
The Killer Features blog first spotted Snappables in Snapchat’s code, though originally thought it was a collaborative Snap creation option. Snapchat acquired game engine PlayCanvas last month, but it’s unclear if that contributed to the Snappables experience. The games look similar to Tribe’s multiplayer selfie video chat games we wrote about this month and predicted Snapchat would copy.
Snapchat’s new bubble gum Snappable game
These aren’t Snapchat’s first selfie games, though. Back in 2016, it tried a Kraft Mac & Cheese noodle catching game, and a holiday elf skiing game that used your face. It’s also worked with partners like Gatorade to build ads that open up to interactive experiences that live inside Snapchat, like a Serena Williams tennis game.
Snapchat first tested selfie games like this Mac & Cheese noodle catcher back in 2016
To play Snappables, you select one of the game Lenses from the Snapchat camera and follow the on-screen instructions. Some you play solo and try to get the highest score, while others let you invite friends to play simultaneously. You can send to a friend a Snap of you playing, which they can use to jump in and play too.
Snapchat could use Snappables to strengthen growth after years of battling Instagram for users and a big redesign that’s received harsh reviews. I can imagine more art-based co-creation Snappables coming in the future, where you cooperate to create a masterpiece. Of course, Instagram probably won’t be far behind in offering games inside Stories.
If the goal of apps like Snapchat is to make people feel like they’re together even when they’re apart, games could help achieve that feeling of co-presence. Sometimes you don’t have anything to talk about or show off. That’s partly why Snapchat got into augmented reality in the first place — to make life more interesting and shareable. But with the challenge, competition and excitement inherent in games, Snappables could help people make memories together no matter the distance in-between.
Here’s more video and photos showing off Snappables:
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Facebook shuts down custom feed-sharing prompts and 12 other APIs
Facebook is making good on Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to prioritize user safety and data privacy over its developer platform. Today Facebook and Instagram announced a slew of API shutdowns and changes designed to stop developers from being able to pull your data or your friends’ data without express permission, drag in public content or trick you into sharing. Some changes go into effect today, and others roll out on August 1 so developers have more than 90 days to fix their apps. They follow the big changes announced two weeks ago.
Most notably, app developers will have to start using the standardized Facebook sharing dialog to request the ability to publish to the News Feed on a user’s behalf. They’ll no longer be able to use the publish_actions API that let them design a custom sharing prompt. A Facebook spokesperson says this change was planned for the future because the consistency helps users feel in control, but the company moved the deadline up to August 1 as part of today’s updates because it didn’t want to have to make multiple separate announcements of app-breaking changes.
Facebook app developers will now have to use this standard Facebook sharing prompt since the publish_action API for creating custom prompts is shutting down
One significant Instagram Graph API change is going into effect today, which removes the ability to pull the name and bio of users who leave comments on your content, though commenters’ usernames and comment text is still available.
Facebook’s willingness to put user safety over platform utility indicates a maturation of the company’s “Hacker Way” that played fast-and-loose with people’s data in order to attract developers to its platform who would in turn create functionality that soaked up more attention.
For more on Facebook’s API changes, check out our breakdown of the major updates:
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Instagram launches “Data Download” tool to let you leave
Two weeks ago TechCrunch called on Instagram to build an equivalent to Facebook’s “Download Your Information feature so if you wanted to leave for another photo sharing network, you could. The next day it announced this tool would be coming and now TechCrunch has spotted it rolling out to users. Instagram’s “Data Download” feature can be accessed here or through the app’s privacy settings. It lets users export their photos, videos, archived Stories, profile, info, comments, and non-ephemeral messages, though it can take a few hours to days for your download to be ready.
An Instagram spokesperson now confirms to TechCrunch that “the Data Download tool is currently accessible to everyone on the web, but access via iOS and Android is still rolling out.” The download contains you profile info, photos, videos, archived Stories (those posted after December 2017), your post and story captions, your uploaded contacts, the usernames of your followers and people you follow, Direct messages, non-ephemeral Direct message photos and videos, comments, Likes, searches, and settings.
The tool’s launch is necessary for Instagram to comply with the data portability rule in European Union’s GDPR privacy law that goes into effect on May 25th. But it’s also a reasonable concession. Instagram has become the dominant image sharing social network with over 800 million users. It shouldn’t need to lock up users’ data in order to keep them around.
[Update: WhatsApp announced today that it too will be rolling out a Data Download tool to all users globally with its next app update as part of its GDPR compliance. Users will be able to export their “account info” which includes their profile photo and group names, but not messages which can be exported or backed up by some phones. WhatsApp is increasing the minimum age to use its app from 13 to 16 in Europe (though it will stay 13 everywhere else). It’s also set up a business entity for operating in Europe, and clarified that it doesn’t share user data with Facebook though it hopes to if regulators let it in the future. However it does share security and anti-spam data to block bad actors on both apps.]
Instagram hasn’t been afraid to attack competitors and fight dirty. Most famously, it copied Snapchat’s Stories in August 2016, which now has over 300 million daily users — eclipsing the original. But it also cut off GIF-making app Phhhoto from its Find Friends feature, then swiftly cloned its core feature to launch Instagram Boomerang. Within a few years, Phhhoto had shut down its app.
If Instagram is going to ruthlessly clone and box out its competitors, it should also let users choose which they want to use. That’s tough if all your photos and videos are trapped inside another app. The tool could create a more level playing field for competition amongst photo apps.
It could also deter users from using sketchy third-party apps to scrape all their Instagram content. Since they typically require you to log in with your Instagram credentials, these put users at risk of being hacked or having their images used elsewhere without their consent. Considering Facebook launched its DYI tool in 2010, six years after the site launched, the fact that it took Instagram 8 years from launch to build this means it’s long overdue.
But with such strong network effect and its willingness to clone any popular potential rival, it may still take a miracle or a massive shift to a new computing platform for any app to dethrone Instagram.
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Etleap scores $1.5 million seed to transform how we ingest data
Etleap is a play on words for a common set of data practices: extract, transform and load. The startup is trying to place these activities in a modern context, automating what they can and in general speeding up what has been a tedious and highly technical practice. Today, they announced a $1.5 million seed round.
Investors include First Round Capital, SV Angel, Liquid2, BoxGroup and other unnamed investors. The startup launched five years ago as a Y Combinator company. It spent a good 2.5 years building out the product, says CEO and founder Christian Romming. They haven’t required additional funding until now because they have been working with actual customers. Those include Okta, PagerDuty and Mode, among others.
Romming started out at adtech startup VigLink and while there he encountered a problem that was hard to solve. “Our analysts and scientists were frustrated. Integration of the data sources wasn’t always a priority and when something broke, they couldn’t get it fixed until a developer looked at it.” That lack of control slowed things down and made it hard to keep the data warehouse up-to-date.
He saw an opportunity in solving that problem and started Etleap . While there were (and continue to be) legacy solutions like Informatica, Talend and Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services, he said when he studied these at a deeply technical level, he found they required a great deal of help to implement. He wanted to simplify ETL as much as possible, putting data integration into the hands of much less technical end users, rather than relying on IT and consultants.
One of the problems with traditional ETL is that the data analysts who make use of the data tend to get involved very late after the tools have already been chosen, and Romming says his company wants to change that. “They get to consume whatever IT has created for them. You end up with a bread line where analysts are at the mercy of IT to get their jobs done. That’s one of the things we are trying to solve. We don’t think there should be any engineering at all to set up an ETL pipeline,” he said.
Etleap is delivered as managed SaaS or you can run it within your company’s AWS accounts. Regardless of the method, it handles all of the managing, monitoring and operations for the customer.
Romming emphasizes that the product is really built for cloud data warehouses. For now, they are concentrating on the AWS ecosystem, but have plans to expand beyond that down the road. “We want to help more enterprise companies make better use of their data, while modernizing data warehousing infrastructure and making use of cloud data warehouses,” he explained.
The company currently has 15 employees, but Romming plans to at least double that in the next 12-18 months, mostly increasing the engineering team to help further build out the product and create more connectors.
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Tableau gets new pricing plans and a data preparation tool
Data analytics platform Tableau today announced the launch of both a new data preparation product and a new subscription pricing plan.
Currently, Tableau offers desktop plans for users who want to analyze their data locally, a server plan for businesses that want to deploy the service on-premises or on a cloud platform, and a fully hosted online plan. Prices for these range from $35 to $70 per user and month. The new pricing plans don’t focus so much on where the data is analyzed but on the analyst’s role. The new Creator, Explorer and Viewer plans are tailored toward the different user experiences. They all include access to the new Tableau Prep data preparation tool, Tableau Desktop and new web authoring capabilities — and they are available both on premises or in the cloud.
Existing users can switch their server or desktop subscriptions to the new release today and then assign each user either a creator, explorer or viewer role. As the name indicates, the new viewer role is meant for users who mostly consume dashboards and visualizations, but don’t create their own. The explorer role is for those who need access to a pre-defined data set and the creator role is for analysts and power user who need access to all of Tableau’s capabilities.
“Organizations are facing the urgent need to empower their entire workforce to help drive more revenue, reduce costs, provide better service, increase productivity, discover the next scientific breakthrough and even save lives,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO at Tableau, in today’s announcement. “Our new offerings will help entire organizations make analytics ubiquitous, enabling them to tailor the capabilities required for every employee.”
As for the new data preparation tool, the general idea here is to give users a visual way to shape and clean their data, something that’s especially important as businesses now often pull in data from a variety of sources. Tableau Prep can automate some of this, but the most important aspect of the service is that it gives users a visual interface for creating these kind of workflows. Prep includes support for all the standard Tableau data connectors and lets users perform calculations, too.
“Our customers often tell us that they love working with Tableau, but struggle when data is in the wrong shape for analysis,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau. “We believe data prep and data analysis are two sides of the same coin that should be deeply integrated and look forward to bringing fun, easy data prep to everyone regardless of technical skill set.”
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Drink-a-day startup Hooch adds a perk-filled premium membership plan
Hooch, the subscription startup that allows members to claim one free drink per day from hundreds of different bars and restaurants, is adding a new membership level called Hooch Black.
Signing up for Hooch Black will cost you significantly more than the regular subscription — instead of $9.99 per month, it’s $295 per year. And you don’t just get in automatically; you actually need to fill out an application.
But in exchange for that money and work, Hooch Black members get access to a variety of perks (on top of the standard drink-a-day option), including deals at more than 100,000 hotels worldwide — co-founder and CEO Lin Dai said that because they’re only visible to members, Hooch gets access to lower “unpublished” prices that you won’t find elsewhere online, with discounts as high as 60 percent.
It also offers preferred reservations, discounts and free champagne at select restaurants. And there are other giveaways, too — in New York City, the launch offerings include Hamilton and Governor’s Ball tickets.
Dai suggested that Hooch has always been meant as an antidote to apps that “facilitate a couch economy” — instead of delivering stuff to your home, Hooch convinces you to go out to bars. Dai said Hooch Black “continues the concept” with all additional perks tied to real-world experiences. (There’s some couch-centric stuff too, like a $100 Postmates credit.)
In addition, Hooch Black members will get access to what Dai described as a “concierge who can make travel arrangements and dining reservations for you.” (Those reservations don’t have to be with Hooch partners, by the way.) He compared the experience to an American Express concierge, but with the advantage that the communication is handled in the Hooch app: “No one wants to pick up the phone anymore.”
About that application: Dai said he wants to limit the initial membership to around 295 people in the three launch cities of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. [Update: While those three cities are the initial target markets for members, Dai said the perks can be used “by almost anyone no matter where you live.”] He hopes to bring in more people eventually, but at first, having thousands of members would “dilute the experience,” particularly since some of the benefits (like access to celeb-hosted parties) don’t really scale.
At the same time, Dai said the application is “not about income or job title.” Instead, he sees the service as appealing to the same audience of “young professionals or millennial hustlers” as Hooch itself. So the application is focused on your bigger ambitions and “how hard you want to work to get there.”
Dai also noted that Hooch’s current membership is roughly even between men and women, something he’s hoping to continue with Hooch Black.
“We want to build a very inclusive community,” he added. “The primary criteria is, I would say, aspiration. We’re not just catering to a specific income level or race or gender.”
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