TechCrunch |
- Report claims Amazon collects over a third of seller revenue, bringing in $121B in 2021
- Daily Crunch: Spotify packs its 2021 year-end recap with new sharing, social features
- Razer launches handheld dev kit with brand new Snapdragon G3x chip
- Square is changing its name to Block
- Gift Guide: The smarter home
- DAOs as the future? Hard pass, thanks
- American Express taps Opy for its first US third-party BNPL offering
- Ahead of public market debut, Better.com lays off 9% of its staff
- How to execute an amplified marketing strategy
- Amazon Lex brings automated call transcript review to chatbot building
- T-minus three days left to save on passes to TC Sessions: Space 2021
- AWS launches new SageMaker features to make scaling machine learning easier
- 3D printing company Essentium set to go public via SPAC
- Sounding Board lands Series B to move coaching beyond services and into SaaS
- Phase Four aims to roll out its next-gen plasma thruster in the first half of 2022
- AWS launches SageMaker Studio Lab, a free tool for learning machine learning
- AI proves a dab hand at pure mathematics and protein hallucination
- AWS introduces DMS Fleet Advisor to simplify data migration to Amazon cloud
- Butter raises $7M to end ‘accidental’ customer churn due to payment failure
- AWS launches a new tool for diagnosing and fixing database issues in its cloud
| Report claims Amazon collects over a third of seller revenue, bringing in $121B in 2021 Posted: 01 Dec 2021 03:48 PM PST A new study claims that Amazon makes far more from fees on its Marketplace platform than even the cash cow known as AWS. The report says that Amazon’s fees for participating effectively on its store have grown to the point where sellers now give the company about 34% of their earnings — and this has lately become Amazon’s primary revenue stream. The company disputes the report’s findings. The report, “Amazon’s Toll Road,” by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, makes two primary claims. First, the ILSR’s researchers say that in 2021 Amazon will bring in some $121 billion from sellers in the form of fees and advertising payments, about 34% of those sellers’ total revenue. That’s twice the estimated $60 billion from 2019, which at the time was 31% of seller revenue, according to the report. Founder Jeff Bezos himself attempted to counter this narrative when he told Congress that the increasing amount of money going from sellers to Amazon is something of an optical illusion, due to more of them choosing to pay for add-on services like better placement on keyword searches and using Amazon’s own shipping and warehouse infrastructure. In a statement to TechCrunch, Amazon called the ILSR report “inaccurate,” saying it “conflates Amazon's selling fees with our optional add-on services” and that its selling fees are competitive with other online retailers — and certainly the report does combine those numbers. But as its author, Stacy Mitchell, points out, the add-ons have gone from optional to must-have as Amazon has given advantage after advantage to sellers that use them. Reports over the last few years show that the number of ads and sponsored listings on common product searches have increased dramatically. And Amazon gives a score bonus to sellers using the “Fulfilled By Amazon” service, which contributes strongly to whether a product gets certain coveted spots in the listings. And this is without considering the shady business of duplicating successful products. Amazon did not address the claim that sellers are spending 4-5 times as much on ads and placement today as they did in 2016, contributing to the huge increase in income. The company merely said there is a range of ad types and processes, and that it’s “a great way for sellers to help increase the visibility of their products.” It denied that it favors FBA users in search results, though as the link above shows, it seems to do so by indirect means. The other claim made by the report is that Amazon is using creative accounting to mask the enormous revenues generated by seller fees, grouping the huge profits of the Marketplace division with enormous losses incurred in building out their shipping infrastructure. Sure, they’re related — but it’s hardly forthcoming to present an aggregate of two wildly different numbers and claim it represents the business accurately. This is not a new allegation, but Mitchell puts specific numbers on it for 2020, making it more than a general idea.  Image Credits: ILSR “We conclude that seller fees likely generate more profit than AWS. This contradicts conventional wisdom about the company; news stories commonly describe AWS as the source of most of Amazon's earnings,” writes Mitchell in the summary. “Drawing on analysts’ estimates of the margins Amazon likely earns on seller advertising and other seller fees, we find that Marketplace may have generated operating profits of $24 billion in 2020 — significantly more than the $13.5 billion in profit that Amazon reported for AWS. AWS has long been seen as Amazon's cash cow. But this report finds that the tech giant has a second cash cow, which it keeps quietly out of view.” Amazon told me that it “cannot speculate” on 2021 revenue numbers during the year, but did not respond to a follow-up question asking whether the previous years’ numbers in the ILSR report were accurate. Some of these practices are under scrutiny by various government powers, including an FTC led by perhaps now the world’s most famous questioner of Amazon’s business practices, Lina Khan. The ILSR report is merely informative and Amazon can wave it away, but if an FTC task force is looking into similar questions and drawing similar conclusions, the company may have reason to start sweating. |
| Daily Crunch: Spotify packs its 2021 year-end recap with new sharing, social features Posted: 01 Dec 2021 03:10 PM PST To get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 1, 2021! Yes, we've made it to the final inning of the year, which means that the news cycle will slow and we all get some time off? Right? Probably not, but in alternative good news, Brian Heater's robotics newsletter launches tomorrow. It's called Actuator and it is going to kick maximum backside. Snag it here! —Alex P.S. Blue Origin's Ariane Cornell is coming to TC Sessions: Space 2021!
The TechCrunch Top 3
Startups/VCBefore we dive into a bevy of discrete pieces of startup news, another 3D printing company is going public! Via a SPAC! This time it's Austin-based Essentium. Recall that Desktop Metal went public via a SPAC previously. Its stock traded as high as $34.94. It is worth $6.08 per share today.
How to execute an amplified marketing strategy Image Credits: AaronAmat (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Every blog post, Tweet and Instagram Story is an opportunity to explain to customers (and the board) how the company creates value or is a step ahead of the competition. But quality will always beat quantity when it comes to content marketing; Googlebot may be hungry for new links, but potential customers demand expertise and insights. “Marketers need a new plan of action that puts creativity before quantity, audience before engine, and sets connection as the top priority,” says Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO of audio and video content marketing platform Casted. (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Big Tech Inc.Today is the day! Yes, it is Spotify Unwrapped 2021, which means that we've spent the afternoon posting to Twitter all about our excellent musical tastes. TechCrunch has more here on what's new.
And, yes, even more from Amazon:
TechCrunch Experts Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you're a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we'd like to hear about why they loved working with you. If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this article on TechCrunch+ from Marjorie Radlo-Zandi, "4 key strategies for succeeding at international expansion." |
| Razer launches handheld dev kit with brand new Snapdragon G3x chip Posted: 01 Dec 2021 03:00 PM PST Snapdragon’s G3x is Qualcomm’s fantastically exciting bid to embrace the gaming market — a brand new reach for the manufacturer, which introduces powerful GPUs, 5G-enabled connectivity, the ability to power external screens, immersive audio capabilities, haptic feedback and a slew of other features that handheld gaming manufacturers have had to cobble together from other sources. Uniting all of this in a single platform is new — and might mean a renaissance of handheld gaming, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Razer today showed off a developer kit based on the new platform, kick-starting an exciting new era in handheld gaming. The rapid development in mobile phone technologies have been unlocking new products in all sorts of categories for a couple of decades. People are now so used to iPads that we don’t accept crappy airline check-in kiosks anymore. We’re so used to excellent battery life and high-speed internet, that anything that falls short of it sparks impatience and frustration. Relatively affordable consumer-grade quadcopter drones only became possible when accelerometers and processors became cheap enough for consumer electronics tinkerers to take existing components and put them together in new and interesting ways. The march of technology advances is never-ending — and it’s ever so exciting to see Apple launch its own ludicrously powerful processors, and when Google shows off the Tensor processors in the newest-generation Pixel phones, you’d better believe we lean in for a closer look. These are technologies that will have far-reaching impacts in the computing world, but they live in the siloed universes of Apple and Google respectively. Fun, sure, but where the real impact of new processors can be felt by the startup-loving readership of this very publication, is when the OEM manufacturers flex their vision for the future. In short — as a startup, you’re probably not going to be able to get your hands on an Apple M1 Max or a Google Tensor for your own hardware devices. The same isn’t true for Qualcomm and its Snapdragon silicon. Qualcomm is in the unusual space of making processors that are powering the entire world around us. This is the technology that’s going to be powering everything from fridges to cars to drones to … well, anything you can possibly imagine, really. SnapDragon 8 lives in smartphones across the world. The 4100+ platform powers wearables. XR2 with its 5G chipset is going to be doing the heavy lifting for AR/VR applications. The 8cx processors will be living in tablets and PCs — and we’ve seen the Snapdragon Ride platform turn up in cars. Seeing Qualcomm taking a serious look at the gaming market is interesting, taking deep niche products like the Nintendo Switch and giving hardware manufacturers a toolkit to build their own, powerful handheld gaming console platforms. More than just tossing together a pile of chips and wishing console developers a happy journey, Qualcomm made the ever-so-shrewd move to partner with gaming veteran Razer to build a developer kit, so software developers can start getting busy while the hardware manufacturing world spools up its product development afterburners. The Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 Gaming Platform delivers cutting-edge performance and the entire arsenal of Snapdragon Elite Gaming technologies to run all Android games, play content from cloud gaming libraries, stream games from a home console or PC and much more. Available today, the platform is a battle cry for market dominance — and it’s going to be spectacularly interesting to see this one play out.  The Razer/Qualcomm collaboration for a developer kit looks like a hell of a handheld gaming console. Image Credits: Qualcomm The platform has a lot that is particularly interesting, including:
“Razer is extremely excited to partner with Qualcomm Technologies and support them on their way to introduce new cutting-edge technology to the global gaming industry," says Min-Liang Tan, Razer co-founder and CEO. "Together, Qualcomm Technologies and Razer will lead the way with new and innovative solutions that push the boundaries of fidelity and quality available in portable gaming, transforming the way these games are experienced.” You can find out more about the Snapdragon G3x Handheld Developer Kit on Razer.com |
| Square is changing its name to Block Posted: 01 Dec 2021 01:48 PM PST The fintech giant Square is changing its name to Block, effective December 10. The name change, which has been in the works for over a year, is intended to house the company’s various products — including music streaming service Tidal, Cash App, TBD, and of course, Square — under one brand. This announcement comes just days after Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down from his CEO role at Twitter, which he also co-founded. "We built the Square brand for our Seller business, which is where it belongs," said Dorsey in a press release. "Block is a new name, but our purpose of economic empowerment remains the same. No matter how we grow or change, we will continue to build tools to help increase access to the economy." The name Block is also a nod to the company’s growing interest in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. The existing Square Crypto product will also be renamed to Spiral. “Block references the neighborhood blocks where we find our sellers, a blockchain, block parties full of music, obstacles to overcome, a section of code, building blocks, and of course, tungsten cubes,” the company wrote in a Tweet. Square isn’t the first major tech company to rebrand this year, of course. Facebook changed its corporate branding to Meta just over a month ago, as the company faced increased scrutiny in the press and in Congress. But like Square, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg felt that the Facebook brand didn’t represent the company’s growth to include products like Instagram, WhatsApp, Horizon and Quest. Square even referenced the timing of this rebrand in its announcement: “Not to get all meta on you … but we’re going to!” Earlier this year, Afterpay agreed to merge with Square. The company’s Cash App also recently expanded to allow teens aged 13 to 17 to open accounts with parental oversight, while Tidal is preparing for a shift toward direct artist royalty payments in the new year. Block’s NYSE ticker symbol SQ will remain the same. The company also added that there will be no organizational changes at this time. |
| Posted: 01 Dec 2021 01:47 PM PST If you’re just starting to build out a smart home, look no further than Zack Whittaker’s excellent starter kit guide, which should lay the groundwork for a connected home experience. But if you’ve already taken the plunge and find yourself with the key ingredients in place for a smart home, let’s look at some options that can take it to the next level for a truly divine digital domicile. For the purposes of this guide, I’m going to assume that the giftee on your list (which can be you, no shame) already has a lot of the basics in place, like smart lighting, a connected thermostat, etc. That said, I’m going to specifically suggest a few things that work with particular brands of the above, like the Philips Hue smart lighting system, which I continue to maintain is the best and most consistently reliable. This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission. Looking for more ideas? Find our other gift guides here. Lights you never think about Image Credits: Signify I have long had smart lighting, across multiple homes over many years. But only more recently did I introduce a key quality-of-life upgrade into the mix that made smart lighting more than just a convenience and into something much more transformative that I now really couldn’t live without. I’m talking about motion sensors. It may seem simple, but I at first balked at picking any up because they’re actually fairly pricy and rarely go on sale. Specifically, the ones I find the best are the Hue sensors, including both their indoor and outdoor versions depending on your needs. I’ve tried HomeKit sensors (and the Hue sensors can act as HomeKit sensors, too) but they just don’t work as reliably as when you’re working within Hue’s ecosystem with its own smart lights and sensors. Even after I stopped being amazed by it, guests have many times commented on how remarkable it is to walk through our house and have lights just “magically” turn on when they enter a room or area. Being able to change the light’s intensity and other behavior based on time of day is also key. Price: Philips Hue Indoor Motion Sensor, $33 on Amazon | Philips Hue Outdoor Motion Sensor, $48 on Amazon A smart weather station for hyperlocal forecasts Image Credits: Eve I walk the dog every morning and one thing I’ve become very accustomed to is checking the weather to see how to dress before I leave. A range of apps can offer local forecasts, and a lot are even quite granular, but nothing compares to being able to check the weather immediately outside your door from your device. There are a number of connected weather stations available, but the best for me in terms of value for money, features and privacy is the Eve Weather. It’s specifically made for HomeKit, so it’s best for people already in the Apple connected home ecosystem, but if that is you or the person you’re shopping for, the Eve Weather is perfect. It’s an IPX4 water resistance-rated aluminum puck, powered by a single CR2450 replaceable battery. It sets up in minutes, handles all connectivity locally and works with Siri for voice requests about weather conditions. The Eve Weather tracks temperature, as well as humidity and barometric pressure, and can provide you with weather trends for up to 12 hours based on all those signals. Price: $75 on Amazon A kitchen staple with just the right amount of smarts Image Credits: Instant Pot In general, I don’t put a lot of stock in connected kitchen gadgets (see what I did there) but some of the more experienced appliance makers have started to figure out where it makes sense to add smarts to old favorites, and how to do so in a way that results in a reliable and consistent piece of hardware. Instant Pot is a regular Black Friday shopper’s favorite, but this year it’s worth taking a special look at one item in their increasingly vast range: The Instant Pot Pro Plus Smart Multi-Cooker. This 6-quart cooker has all the pressure cooking goodness you expect out of the brand, as well as steaming, sous vide, rice cooking and more, but it also integrates with a receipt app powered by smart cooking company Drop. The recipes are great and a nice feature, but my main reason for suggesting this Instant Pot versus others is the handy remote control of functions like cooking time and pressure level, as well as remote pressure release right from your device via the Instant Brands app. Price: $170 on Amazon When a light switch is much more than a light switch Image Credits: Brilliant I’ve included the Brilliant Control in past TC Gift Guides, but it really is just that good, and usage over time has only reinforced that. The Brilliant Control is a touchscreen smart home controller that you install in place of a standard light switch using existing wiring (it’s easy to do regardless of your level of skill and experience — just remember to cut power at the breaker). The Brilliant Control panels all include a built-in camera for local network-based video intercom functionality, and the software is compatible with a wide range of smart home devices, including Sonos systems, Hue lights, Ring doorbells and many more. You can assign specific lights and speakers to individual panels, too, so that they can control specifically the lights and playback in the room they’re in. I can recall some adventurous smart home DIY pioneers trying to cobble together a system like this using iPod touches and hacky mounts, but Brilliant makes it remarkably easy to build a smart home system that rivals a lot of those you’ll find in expensive custom pre-build installations. They also come in up to four-switch panels for whatever bank of switches you want to replace. Price: Varies based on configuration; as pictured above, $449 from Brilliant Ditch the keys Image Credits: Yale TechCrunch’s Greg Kumparak dropped by to add this one:
Price: Nest x Yale smart lock, $249 from Google | Yale Assure HomeKit smart lock, $289 from Amazon
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| DAOs as the future? Hard pass, thanks Posted: 01 Dec 2021 12:46 PM PST It seems like just yesterday that exchanges like Coinbase opened the eyes of the traditional economy to the benefits that cryptocurrencies offer as an asset class. Cryptocurrencies and other decentralized technologies have created applications that promise to create real social value by offering an automated way to establish trust, but at a much lower cost than traditional intermediaries (banks and governments) that have monopolized trust as a service. Building on the decentralized revolution, forward thinkers are already talking about the next big breakthrough — the decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO — that can guarantee trust at the organizational level. But while the problems DAOs might solve are real, DAO proponents misunderstand the nature of these problems and offer a tool that creates more harm than benefit. Decentralized applications are built on smart contracts — algorithms that run when predetermined conditions are met and, by doing so, automate common decisions. Smart contracts create trust by guaranteeing predictability; when a predetermined set of actions occur, you will get paid in tokens. Enthusiasts look at DAOs as the next logical step to this trust-building process by bundling a series of smart contracts to create what they describe as a smart "organization" — where business decisions like inventory control, cash management, pricing and even hiring are made based on predetermined inputs. For an extreme example, think about an Amazon third-party reseller. This business operates on a number of simple inputs — the level of interest in its various products, the cost of raw materials and production at different facilities, shipping costs and so on. Based on these predetermined inputs, the value for an investor of the business should be pretty simple to determine, and a DAO would eliminate managers making bad — or self-interested — decisions. Business owners are constantly making decisions that may be suboptimal from an investor perspective for reasons that are at best opaque and far too often made for personal benefit. For example, the decision to switch to a higher-cost manufacturer could be a hedge against product returns based on poor quality, or it could be because the new manufacturer is the owner's cousin. With a DAO, the entire business could be run with no humans at all, with all decisions made by a series of smart contracts. If a certain line of products is not selling, production decreases automatically, and price may also decrease until inventory is reduced. As sales increase, production increases. As production costs increase, price increases and so on. And profits would accrue to DAO investors that had, in turn, made investment decisions made based on preset (and preapproved) smart contracts. But this very reliance on smart contracts solving small problems remains subject to what proponents misleadingly call the edge cases. What if there is a strike or a fire at a manufacturer? It is hard to imagine a smart contract anticipating better than a human manager when it is safe to resume placing orders with them. This is why businesses use traditional contracts in addition to smart contracts — the reality is that the world of business relationships is far more messy and multivalent than can be predicted by a series of smart contracts. DAOs, of course, could continue to retain humans (as employees or as consultants) to solve these kinds of edge cases, but I question whether humans would want to get called in to clean up smart contract messes. Decentralized finance has created value by more effectively validating quantifiable economic decisions. This has been successful because an automated trust mechanism for simple (or even complex) transactions has a simple metric (economic value) to measure the benefit of the decision. But there is a profound difference between solving for trust in transactions and creating trust in relationships, let alone in organizations or communities. People gain economic value from transactions, but they gain other, different kinds of value from being a part of relationships and organizations. From being a part of an organization, we derive a sense of place, and from this sense of place, ultimately a sense of self. This sense of place is derived from the web of reciprocal relationships that are constantly being renegotiated between one another and within a group. And in an organizational relationship, we constantly have to weigh between competing values in making a decision — should I do something that doesn't make economic sense, but makes it more likely that someone will help me in the future? Pierre Bourdieu described the totality of these values as a field and stressed that each person's field is constituted differently based on their accumulated historical and cultural circumstances. According to Bourdieu, to master these relationships, one needs not an all-purpose algorithm, but an intuition that he called a "sense of the game." This sense of the game is what separates a visionary from a good businessman. And, more importantly, it is what separates a good person from a good manager. For me, the ultimate proof that a DAO can replace our existing flawed business organizations is when a smart contract can decide that it is a good time to give an employee the day off. If you are a DeFi enthusiast, that should be your challenge. |
| American Express taps Opy for its first US third-party BNPL offering Posted: 01 Dec 2021 12:30 PM PST Credit card companies are seeking to push further into the "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) market. American Express (Amex) announced today that it plans to partner with Opy, the U.S. subsidiary of Australian fintech Openpay, to allow all of its U.S. cardmembers to pay in installments for qualifying purchases in the healthcare and automotive segments. The partnership is American Express's first third-party BNPL agreement in the United States, a spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch in an email. Amex will help onboard merchants in these sectors onto its platform. Opy describes its solution as an improved version of the traditional BNPL model, which it calls "buy now, pay smarter." Opy will lend up to $20,000 at once to a customer, charging them a fixed fee and offering plans as long as 24 months, unlike the shorter-term installments offered by companies like Affirm and Klarna. American Express already offers its own BNPL options under its "Pay it Plan it" program launched in 2017 for purchases above $100, which also offers a fixed interest rate. The Opy partnership will help Amex meet demand for options to finance large purchases over longer periods of time, Opy U.S. CEO Brian Shniderman told TechCrunch. "If it’s a big item — and this is where we specialize — things that are $1,000 to $20,000, 60 days isn’t really enough time to pay off something that’s more expensive," he said. The company is able to offer lower rates, never higher than 9.99%, because it targets very specific sectors that attract financially savvy customers, per Shniderman. Its average customer is 40 years old, while many other BNPL providers' average customers are in their 20s, he added. Besides healthcare and automotive, Opy offers financing for home improvement and educational certification, though those two verticals are not set to be included in the Amex partnership. "[Our product is] predictable, transparent. If you look at the other buy, now pay later companies out there, they have deferred interest, there’s back interest if you miss a payment. They recalculate all of that 0% interest as though you had a very high interest rate for the life of the loan," Shniderman, who worked closely with Amex in his prior role at Deloitte, said. Amex's major competitors have also made recent forays into BNPL in an attempt to keep pace with payments companies like Stripe and Square. Mastercard launched its homegrown Mastercard Installments offering this fall, and Visa announced a brand partnership with Klarna shortly thereafter. |
| Ahead of public market debut, Better.com lays off 9% of its staff Posted: 01 Dec 2021 12:27 PM PST One day after announcing an amendment to its SPAC agreement, digital mortgage lender Better.com confirmed today that it is laying off roughly 9% of its nearly 10,000 person staff. Doing the math, that amounts to about 900 people. The company declined to comment beyond the following written statement from CFO Kevin Ryan: “A fortress balance sheet and a reduced and focused workforce together set us up to play offense going into a radically evolving homeownership market.” People familiar with internal happenings in the company, which is set to go public in the near future at a $6.9 billion valuation, told TechCrunch that a few factors drove the decision behind the staff reductions. For one, the mortgage market is expected to contract pretty significantly after 18 months of rapid expansion driven by historically lower interest rates. Better has been vocal about its desire to build out its purchase experience and move beyond digital lending to help people find and purchase homes. It's also working to expand value-added offerings like title and homeowner's insurance as part of its product suite. Bottom line, the company has "too many people in the wrong places," according to our sources, who preferred to remain anonymous. This also appears to be a case of technology replacing human labor. Better's automation efforts means fewer manual process and a business that is more machine-driven, hence the need for fewer human resources. The layoffs are primarily taking place in the U.S. and India, the sources said. On Nov. 30, TechCrunch reported that the company was getting a cash infusion from its backers sooner than expected. Blank-check company Aurora Acquisition Corp. and SoftBank decided to amend the terms of their financing agreement to provide Better with half of the $1.5 billion they committed immediately instead of waiting until the deal closes. No word on whether the company has been in a cash crunch, but an email from CFO Ryan to employees obtained by TechCrunch revealed that Better would have about $1 billion on its balance sheet by week's end. It's possible that the layoffs were a condition to getting that deal approved. According to the Daily Beast, the layoffs were quick and a big surprise. The Daily Beast’s Noah Kirsch reported that in the U.S., all affected workers were summoned into a mass webinar on Wednesday, where founder and CEO Vishal Garg “delivered a short speech informing them that they were being terminated.” After Garg's speech, the meeting ended abruptly, and the affected employees' computers automatically shut down, Kirsch also reported. Note: Ryan Lawler contributed to this story. |
| How to execute an amplified marketing strategy Posted: 01 Dec 2021 11:25 AM PST Content marketers today face a constant struggle between keeping up with the volume of content they're expected to produce and getting creative to produce rich, quality work that deeply impacts their audience. Content marketing is recognized as a powerful tool, driving higher conversions than traditional marketing. However, the teams creating that content are using an outdated playbook that focuses on serving algorithms before audiences by constantly churning out posts targeting bots over brains.
An amplified marketing strategy fosters a connection between your audience and the expertise they're seeking. In an Accenture survey of more than 1,000 marketing executives across the globe, respondents were unanimous: Content overload is a top challenge. And 50% said they currently have more content than they are fully prepared to manage. The strategies that made content marketing so riveting at its start haven't evolved to meet the challenges of today's marketers as they compete for their audience's attention in a vast landscape of newsletters, podcasts, video series, blogs and social media. With too much content to create or manage and too little time to measure its success or repurpose what they've already created, marketers need a new plan of action that puts creativity before quantity, audience before engine, and sets connection as the top priority. They need an amplified marketing strategy. What is amplified marketing?The amplified marketing approach puts captivating conversations at the center of your content strategy. Those conversations — with industry experts, customers, internal thought leaders, influencers and decision-makers — serve as the source material for all your marketing assets, streamlining your content creation, aligning your teams across channels and giving your audience the insights they're seeking. Amplified marketing turns to powerful metrics to identify what resonates with an audience and what's not catching on. By extracting more value from the content they create and assessing its success, marketers can work more efficiently, effectively and creatively.
Start with a conversationAmplified marketing starts with a good conversation with someone who knows what they're talking about on a topic your audience wants to explore. How do you do that? Bring the focus back to the audience. Consider what questions they need answered, what new ideas they're missing out on and what subjects excite or inspire them. Instead of developing a list of topics for content marketers to research and write about, put together a list of people who can offer your audience those answers, insights and big ideas. |
| Amazon Lex brings automated call transcript review to chatbot building Posted: 01 Dec 2021 11:19 AM PST Today, at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced the Amazon Lex automated chat bot designer in preview, a new feature that simplifies the chatbot training and design process by bringing a level of automation to it. “We are excited to announce the Amazon Lex automated chat bot designer, a new capability that reduces bot design from weeks to just hours,” Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon AI told the audience at the AI and machine learning keynote today. It does this by taking advantage of advanced natural language understanding powered by deep learning techniques. In fact, he said that developers can now create a foundational chatbot designed using historical call transcripts in just a few clicks. “[The Amazon Lex] automated chat bot designer can typically analyze 10,000 lines of transcripts within a couple of hours to identify intents such as ‘file a new claim’ or ‘check claim status.’ It makes sure these intents are well separated and there is no overlap between them, eliminating the need for a trial and error approach,” he explained. He said that without this automation, it’s a highly manual and tedious developer task. “The organizational design of a chatbot is highly complex, manual and prone to errors. It requires understanding the nuances of a spoken language and human interactions, and without this specific expertise, developers spend hundreds of hours combing through all the historic called transcripts to find things like common user requests and the required information to to solve this problem.” When you think about a common use case for AI, chatbots certainly come to mind. They may be designed for in-house use to answer questions about how to order a new computer or get your newborn child on the company health insurance, or they may act as a customer service front end to collect vital information and answer simple questions, while funneling more complex questions to a human customer service agent. Many startups have launched to make it easier to create more accurate chatbots, but it’s also low-hanging fruit for a company like Amazon, whose customers may be looking for a solution on the platform to go with their other AI and machine learning projects. The Amazon Lex automated chat builder is available starting today in preview. Developers can use this feature for free during the preview phase, but will be charged based on the time it takes the tool to analyze a transcript and identify the intents once it is generally available.
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| T-minus three days left to save on passes to TC Sessions: Space 2021 Posted: 01 Dec 2021 11:05 AM PST Countdowns aren't just for space launches, you know. They're also for serious savings on passes to the all-virtual TechCrunch Sessions: Space event which, no spoiler alert here, also includes expert presentations on the business of space launches. Right now, you have only T-minus three days left to save $100 on the price of admission to our two-day conference designed specifically for the visionaries building, funding and forging a new space economy. Buy your pass before December 3 and keep $100 in your personal economy. Every TechCrunch event features the top movers and shakers in their industry, and we've got an amazing lineup of brilliant space cadets ready to share their expertise and insight to help you grow your startup or your investment portfolio. You'll find every interview, presentation, panel discussion, breakout session and networking opportunity listed in the event agenda. Here's a quick sample of the people and topics TC Sessions: Space 2021 has in store for you. Securing Space at Speed — The demand signal is clear: The U.S. government needs to spur innovative commercial capabilities to excel in an increasingly contested space domain. Hear directly from leaders driving government-commercial collaborations about opportunities to help usher in the next era of achievement in space. Steve Isakowitz (Aerospace Corporation) and Pete Muend (National Reconnaissance Office). Space SPACs and the Public Market — We saw a number of space companies go public this past year, and many took the SPAC merger route to get there. Andrew Rush (Redwire), Adam Spice (Rocket Lab) and Astra will talk about their respective paths to the public markets and what it's meant for their companies and the industry. How tech startups do business with the DoD and U.S. Space Force — Sam Riehn (SBIR Advisors) will describe the three main problems technology startups face when working with the Department of Defense (DoD). Learn how to overcome them and win multimillion dollar deals with the DoD and U.S. Space Force using the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. A word about the out-of-this-world networking opportunities (another space pun: sorry-not-sorry). In addition to the scheduled breaks, don't forget to go see the 10 early-stage space startups exhibiting in our virtual expo — they're a mighty impressive bunch. Plus, you'll find plenty of attendees from aerospace primes like Aerospace Corporation, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Technologies and Northrup Grumman. Use CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, to find them and schedule a meeting. Or take a less formal approach and introduce yourself using the chat feature in our virtual event platform. TC Sessions: Space 2021 takes place on December 14-15. The countdown is on, and your time is running out. Buy your pass before December 3, and you'll save $100. Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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| AWS launches new SageMaker features to make scaling machine learning easier Posted: 01 Dec 2021 11:03 AM PST At its annual re:Invent conference, AWS today rolled out a slew of new features for SageMaker, the company’s managed service for building, training and deploying machine learning (ML) models. Swami Sivasubramanian, the vice president of machine learning at Amazon, said the new features aim to make it easier for users to scale machine learning in their organizations. Firstly, AWS launched a new SageMaker Ground Truth Plus service that uses an expert workforce to deliver high-quality training datasets faster. SageMaker Ground Truth Plus uses a labeling workflow including machine learning techniques for active learning, pre-labeling and machine validation. The company says the new service reduces costs by up to 40% and doesn’t require users to have deep machine learning expertise. The service enables users to create training datasets without having to build labeling applications. SageMaker Ground Truth Plus is currently available in Northern Virginia. The company also rolled out a new SageMaker Inference Recommender tool to help users choose the best available compute instance to deploy machine learning models for optimal performance and cost. AWS says the tool automatically selects the right compute instance type, instance count, container parameters and model optimizations. Amazon SageMaker Inference Recommender is generally available in all regions where SageMaker is available except the AWS China regions. In addition, AWS released the preview of a new SageMaker Serverless Interface option that allows users to easily deploy machine learning models for inference without having to configure or manage the underlying infrastructure. The new option is available in Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Ireland, Tokyo and Sydney.  Image Credits: TechCrunch With SageMaker Training Compiler, AWS today launched a new feature that can accelerate the training of deep learning models by up to 50% through more efficient use of GPU instances. The feature covers deep learning models from their high-level language representation to hardware-optimized instructions. The new feature is generally available in Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon and Ireland. Lastly, AWS announced that users can now monitor and debug their Apache Spark jobs running on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) right from SageMaker Studio notebooks with just a click. The company notes that you can now also discover, connect to, create, terminate and manage EMR clusters directly from SageMaker Studio. “The built-in integration with EMR therefore enables you to do interactive data preparation and machine learning at peta-byte scale right within the single universal SageMaker Studio notebook,” AWS explains in a blog post. The new SageMaker Studio features are available in Northern Virginia, Ohio, Northern California, Oregon, central Canada, Frankfurt, Ireland, Stockholm, Paris, London, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Sao Paolo. On a related note, AWS also today launched SageMaker Studio Lab, a free service to help developers learn machine learning techniques and experiment with the technology. Yesterday, AWS announced a new machine learning service called Amazon SageMaker Canvas. The new service will allow users to build machine learning prediction models, using a point-and-click interface.
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| 3D printing company Essentium set to go public via SPAC Posted: 01 Dec 2021 10:58 AM PST The world of additive manufacturing is not immune from the SPAC craze. Desktop Metal, Shapeways, Markforged and Velo3D have all either completed or announced plans to go public through the process. Austin-based Essentium this week highlighted plans to add its name to the growing list, courtesy of a reverse merger with Atlantic Coastal Acquisition Corporation. The deal would value the combined companies at $974 million, including $345 million in cash, courtesy of Atlantic Coastal. Essentium cites ongoing supply chain issues as a motivating factor in growing interest around additive manufacturing/3D printing. "Fundamental deficits in our existing global supply chain models are being exacerbated by escalating obstacles such as trade imbalances and the global pandemic — all leading to protracted distribution bottlenecks," CEO Blake Teipel said in a release. "Today's announcement represents a major milestone in our efforts to provide long-term, sustainable solutions for a new manufacturing paradigm that can meet these global challenges head-on." We spoke to Teipel back in 2017, when Essentium detailed a plasma-based system that fuses together plastic 3D-printed material as it prints, resulting in a stronger object than the traditional FDM process. Essentium also utilizes a High Speed Extrusion process, one it claims is 5x to 15x faster than standard extrusion. The company's existing clients include the U.S. DoD, Lockheed Martin and Ford. The deal is expected to close in Q1 2022. |
| Sounding Board lands Series B to move coaching beyond services and into SaaS Posted: 01 Dec 2021 10:50 AM PST Sounding Board, which started as a platform to connect leaders to coaches through a marketplace, realized early in the pandemic that mentorship needs a refresh. "We’ve always delivered coaching in this traditional services format," said Christine Tao, Sounding Board CEO and co-founder. "Well, we’re not in the office anymore so we actually have to speak differently about how we’re developing our talent and our leaders." The insight led to the launch of a software platform that let users not only connect with coaches, but also track goals on an ongoing basis.  Image Credits: Sounding Board Now, nearly a year after landing a Series A with this vision, Sounding Board has closed a $30 million Series B led by Jazz Venture Partners and joined by Gaingels as well as angel investors such as theBoardlist's Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Ancestry.com's Deb Liu, Udemy's Yvonne Chen and Engage VC's Tammy Aguiloon. Previous investors in the company include Canaan Partner and Precursor Ventures. The round also saw JAZZ Venture Partners' John Spinale join the board, an addition to Sounding Boards' all-female team (and all-female board). “The joke is that we actually had to add diversity to our board … a man," Tao laughed. The fundraise comes off of solid growth for Sounding Board, which touts that it has had sequential growth for the past seven quarters. While Tao wouldn't share specifics on revenues, the company said revenue was in the “multimillions” in the past and annual bookings have increased more than 350% year over year. Looking at stickiness, Sounding Board claims that net revenue retention is over 200%, meaning that existing customers continue to pay for the platform as time goes on. BetterUp, one of Sounding Board's largest competitors, has been on a recent acquisition spree that illustrates a similarly shifting focus on the software behind coaching. It bought Motive to help BetterUp clients understand the emotional context behind data that they already aggregate, through engagement surveys or polls. The unicorn also scooped up Impraise, which uses technology to help managers better support their direct reports, through real-time performance reviews and more seamless feedback channels. Tao thinks BetterUp's growth has helped elevate the importance of executive training to investors but still sees room for more leadership-focused services instead of a broad-based coaching tool. Over the last year, the co-founder said she's seen a lot of solutions that are focused on helping individuals manage their capacity through supporting mental and emotional state (e.g., BetterUp care). "But alongside that you actually also need to have real skills and capability to be able to manage and effectively communicate," she said. Sounding Board is more interested in solving for the capability side of executive training, and for now, has no plans to focus on the mental health aspect of it. Of course this could cause competitors to win market share from Sounding Board if they offer both sides in a rich way. For now, Sounding Board's customers don't seem to mind. "If you think about your company’s benefits [with mental health], it's a bit more hands off … it's kind of there and then you choose whether or not you opt into it but it's really meant to be there for employees,” she said. "Whereas I think for capability-building there is this business need, investment they want to make and a level of responsibility that they have." Sounding Board currently has 100 customers, including Plaid, Chime and Bill.com. |
| Phase Four aims to roll out its next-gen plasma thruster in the first half of 2022 Posted: 01 Dec 2021 10:38 AM PST Space startup Phase Four will be rolling out the next generation of its Maxwell radio-frequency plasma propulsion system next year, which the company says offers key performance improvements to allow spacecraft using it a wider range of maneuverability in orbit. In general, when moving a satellite around in the vacuum of space, one cares about two key performance metrics: thrust and "specific impulse" (ISP), a measure of the system's efficiency in how much thrust it provides per unit of propellant. These trade-offs are especially salient for small spacecraft manufacturers. Systems with high thrust require carrying a lot of fuel – a costly choice for a satellite that could be the size of a mini-fridge. But propulsion tech that offers high ISP isn't ideal either, especially if the satellite is heading to space in a rideshare mission and must reach its final orbit on its own. Often, traditional electric thrusters maximize specific impulse but at the expense of thrust – so while the thruster could be very efficient, maneuvers can take months. Phase Four's Maxwell thrusters have gotten rid of this trade-off, allowing customers to operate at a relatively high thrust mode or at a high ISP, explained CTO Umair Siddiqui. That means being able to perform both fast maneuvers when required or to enter a high ISP mode to save propellant. The company introduced these innovations in its first product, the Maxwell Block 1 thruster. The new iteration of the Maxwell thruster, Maxwell Block 2, offers a performance improvement in these metrics of around 85%. "This is significant," he said. "[An] 85% improvement in ISP or thrust means that much less propellant usage or that much less time you're maneuvering in orbit." Phase Four's Maxwell thrusters have a few other innovations as well. The traditional plasma thruster, called the Hall-effect thruster, generates thrust using cathode materials that are difficult to manufacture. The systems are also bulky, which isn't ideal for many customers. To solve these problems, Phase Four's thrusters use radio-frequency plasma sources, rather than a cathode and anode, to generate thrust. That means a smaller thruster that's easier to manufacture and that can accept any gaseous propellant – not just expensive Hall-effect thruster propellants like xenon or krypton. The aim is to maintain production runs of under four months for the Block 2, an approximate timeline that the company first hit with the Block 1 thruster. The ability to keep such a quick turnaround is due, in part, to the modular design of the products. The Maxwell engines use a "chassis" style that borrows, at least in philosophy, from the auto industry. "We can still use the same production line to fold in next generation developments, and that’s the requirement for the product," Siddiqui said. "It's a plasma thruster with manufacturability thought at the outset." The company, which was founded in 2015, has delivered ten Maxwell Block 1 systems to customers so far. This summer, Phase Four raised a $26 million Series B led by New Science Ventures LLC. |
| AWS launches SageMaker Studio Lab, a free tool for learning machine learning Posted: 01 Dec 2021 10:30 AM PST At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced SageMaker Studio Lab, a free service to help developers learn machine learning techniques and experiment with the technology. Studio Lab provides users with all of the basics to get started, including a JupyterLab IDE, model training on CPUs and GPUs and 15 GB of persistent storage. In addition, Amazon also today launched the AWS AI & ML Scholarship Program. The company is committing $10 million oer year to this program, which it runs in collaboration with Intel and Udacity. 2,000 students will receive Udacity Nanodegree scholarships through this program every year, in addition to mentorship from Amazon and Intel employees. "The two initiatives we are announcing today are designed to open up educational opportunities in machine learning to make it more widely accessible to anyone who is interested in the technology," said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning at AWS. "Machine learning will be one of the most transformational technologies of this generation. If we are going to unlock the full potential of this technology to tackle some of the world's most challenging problems, we need the best minds entering the field from all backgrounds and walks of life. We want to inspire and excite a diverse future workforce through this new scholarship program and break down the cost barriers that prevent many from getting started with machine learning."  Image Credits: AWS To get started with Studio Lab, developer can sign up for a free account, which needs to get approved before you can use the service. It’s unclear what the requirements for getting access are, though. “Our mission at AWS is to make machine learning (ML) more accessible. Through many conversations over the past years, I learned about barriers that many ML beginners face,” AWS’s Antje Barth writes in today’s announcement. “Existing ML environments are often too complex for beginners, or too limited to support modern ML experimentation. Beginners want to quickly start learning and not worry about spinning up infrastructure, configuring services, or implementing billing alarms to avoid going over budget. This emphasizes another barrier for many people: the need to provide billing and credit card information at sign-up.”
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| AI proves a dab hand at pure mathematics and protein hallucination Posted: 01 Dec 2021 09:51 AM PST One of the reasons artificial intelligence is such an interesting field is that pretty much no one knows what it might turn out to be good at. Two papers by leading labs published in the journal Nature today show that machine learning can be applied to tasks as technically demanding as protein generation and as abstract as pure mathematics. The protein thing may not sound like much of a surprise given the recent commotion around AI’s facility in protein folding, as demonstrated by Google’s DeepMind and the University of Washington’s Baker Lab, not coincidentally also the ones who put out the papers we’re noting today. The study from the Baker Lab shows that the model they created to understand how protein sequences are folded can be repurposed to essentially do the opposite: create a new sequence meeting certain parameters and which acts as expected when tested in vitro. This wasn’t necessarily obvious — you might have an AI that’s great at detecting boats in pictures but can’t draw one, for instance, or an AI that translates Polish to English but not vice versa. So the discovery that an AI built to interpret the structure of proteins can also make new ones is an important one. There has already been some work done in this direction by various labs, such as ProGen over at SalesForce Research. But Baker Lab’s RoseTTAFold and DeepMind’s AlphaFold are way out in front when it comes to accuracy in proteomic predictions, so it’s good to know the systems can turn their expertise to creative endeavors. AI abstractionsMeanwhile, DeepMind captured the cover of Nature with a paper showing that AI can aid mathematicians in complex and abstract tasks. The results won’t turn the math world on its head, but they are truly novel and truly due to the help of a machine learning model, something that has never happened before. The idea here relies on the fact that mathematics is largely the study of relationships and patterns — as one thing increases, another decreases, say, or as the faces of a polyhedron increase, so too does the number of its vertices. Because these things happen according to systems, mathematicians can arrive at conjectures about the exact relationship between those things. Some of these ideas are simple, like the trigonometry expressions we learned in grade school: It’s a fundamental quality of triangles that the sum of their internal angles adds up to 180 degrees, or that the sum of the squares of the shorter sides is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. But what about for a 900-sided polyhedron in 8-dimensional space? Could you find the equivalent of a2 + b2 = c2 for that?  An example of the relationship between two complex qualities of knots: their geometry and algebraic signature. Image Credits: DeepMind Mathematicians do, but there are limits to the amount of such work they can do, simply because one must evaluate many examples before one can be sure that a quality observed is universal and not coincidental. It is here, as a labor-saving method, that DeepMind deployed its AI model. “Computers have always been good at spewing out data at a scale that humans can't match but what is different [here] is the ability of AI to pick out patterns in the data that would have been impossible to detect on a human scale,” explained Oxford professor of mathematics Marcus du Sautoy in the DeepMind news release. Now, the actual accomplishments made with the help of this AI system are miles above my head, but the mathematicians among our readers will surely understand the following, quoted from DeepMind:
The conjectures were borne out with millions of examples — another advantage of computation, that you can tell it to rigorously test your hypothesis without buying it pizza and coffee. The DeepMind researchers and the professors mentioned above worked closely together to come up with these specific applications, so we’re not looking at a “universal pure math helper” or anything like that. But as Ruhr University Bochum’s Christian Stump notes in the Nature summary of the article, that it works at all is an important step toward such an idea. “Neither result is necessarily out of reach for researchers in these areas, but both provide genuine insights that had not previously been found by specialists. The advance is therefore more than the outline of an abstract framework,” he wrote. “Whether or not such an approach is widely applicable is yet to be determined, but Davies et al. provide a promising demonstration of how machine-learning tools can be used to support the creative process of mathematical research.” |
| AWS introduces DMS Fleet Advisor to simplify data migration to Amazon cloud Posted: 01 Dec 2021 09:29 AM PST Two years ago at AWS re:Invent, then AWS CEO Andy Jassy made it clear that he was tired of the slow pace of change and he wanted to find ways to get companies to move to the cloud faster. At yesterday’s opening keynote, in fact, new AWS CEO Adam Selipsky stated that the pace is still pretty pokey with only between 5 and 15 percent of workloads having moved to the cloud thus far. Part of the problem for the slow pace of change is that in spite of the recognized advantages of moving to the cloud, migrating data from on-premises to the cloud is a labor-intensive task, and it’s not easy to get your data from your on-prem legacy database to a shiny new cloud database. Companies with multiple types of databases face an even bigger challenges when it comes to moving that data to the cloud and finding the right database service to match up with whatever you have been using on prem. Amazon recognized all of this and wanted to make it easier for customers to move to the cloud. Today, the company introduced AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) Fleet Advisor, a tool specifically designed to help make it easier and faster to get your data to the cloud and match it with the correct database service. “DMS Fleet Advisor automatically builds an inventory of your on-prem database and analytics service by streaming data from on prem to Amazon S3. From there, we take it over. We analyze [the data] to match it with the appropriate amount of AWS Datastore and then provide customized migration plans. All of this now just takes hours instead of what used to be weeks or months,” Swami Sivasubramanian, VP for Amazon AI told the AWS re:Invent audience at the AI and machine learning keynote today. Sivasubramanian pointed out that this approach is not only faster, it’s also cheaper because you no longer have to rely on a third-party consultant to move the data for you. “This is going to make it a lot easier for you to modernize your data infrastructure with powerful relational and purposeful databases,” he said.
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| Butter raises $7M to end ‘accidental’ customer churn due to payment failure Posted: 01 Dec 2021 09:20 AM PST Vijay Menon, a statistician by trade, began his career at Microsoft. It was there that he realized there was an astounding number of subscriptions that failed to renew or even go through to begin with due to payment-related issues. He became intrigued by the problem, and solving it. Ultimately in 2016 alone, he helped the company recover over 10 million Xbox Live subscriptions, which resulted in over $100 million in recovered revenue. In his subsequent roles at Dropbox and Scribd, Menon realized the problem of accidental payment churn was not exclusive to Microsoft. It was a challenge that plagued all B2B subscription and SaaS businesses. "Every subscription company deals with this black hole," he said. Payment failure, in fact, is the among the biggest causes of customer churn and represents nearly half of all subscription churn. Even more alarming, Menon came to understand, the companies weren't even aware of what was happening. False declines are estimated to be a $443 billion problem by the end of this year, according to Cardinal Commerce), resulting in millions of lost subscribers. The accidental churn is often not just due to problems with renewals, where people get frustrated by failed attempts to charge their credit card, for example. It is also largely a problem at the sign-up process, especially in countries outside the U.S., where charges are often falsely declined due to being attempted in another country. To Menon, it was a massive market severely underserved by traditional payment service providers such as Stripe who are strong domestically, but in his view, were poor at clearing international payments in growing markets like Brazil, India and Mexico. Menon estimates that on average, 4% of subscription customers are lost monthly to legitimate payments failing. Consumers outside the U.S. might be clicking submit on a given transaction, but if they’re using a card form that’s configured for the U.S., they could be getting rejected, and "no one’s really checking on what happens after the user drops off," Menon said. So in 2020, he teamed up with venture studio Atomic to found Butter, a startup aimed at helping companies retain existing customers and sign on new ones by preventing this accidental payment churn. Using machine learning, Butter aims to end the churn by preventing drop-off from legitimate payments. "We focus on two problems that can affect any subscription business, which is basically 'how do I check out a payment upfront and make sure that payment actually goes through?,' " Menon told TechCrunch. "The other part is, what do we do when a payment fails?" The San Francisco-based startup has raised $7 million, largely from Atomic, to tackle the problem. In a year's time, it has also signed on about a dozen consumer subscription companies, including some large names (which he declined to reveal publicly), doing $10 million to $500 million in revenue — many of which have an international user base. It claims that it helps these companies find, on average, $1 million of revenue per year. Its revenue-sharing model is designed to align incentives with those of its customers. It charges a percentage of what it saves for its customers. For example, Menon estimates that a $100 million ARR company would be able to see $1 to $4 million in ARR lift which is a lot, and a $500 million ARR company, around $2.5 to $5 million. An economy increasingly reliant on subscription models places new challenges on existing payment systems that are typically out of date, complicated, vary by country and constantly changing based on new fraud rules, according to Menon. "Even massive companies like Netflix and Spotify who have invested significant internal resources – payments engineering teams – in this problem, struggle because the payment landscape changes so frequently," Menon told TechCrunch. "The Butter payments intelligence platform was built to scout through obscure payments networks to find what is broken."  Image Credits: Butter Butter plans to use its new capital to do "top of the funnel optimization," according to Menon. When a consumer checks out, there are about 128 different data elements that can be presented with every payload, he said. "We're investing into the capabilities that will be able to make decisions [around those elements] in real time so that these folks coming in through the funnel will have a much higher likelihood of that payment going through," he added. Long term, he said, the company aims to build an AWS, or operating system, for payments. "We're trying to build a connective tissue for the entire payments ecosystem. We sit above what we call the payment service providers so we're not Stripe, we're not Braintree, we're sitting above them," Menon explained. "We want to work with any company, regardless of what your payments stack is." It also, naturally, plans to do more hiring. Recently, Bill Hoppin joined the company as a co-founder and COO. Butter expects to have about 50 employees by the end of Q1 2022. Jack Abraham, CEO and managing partner of Atomic, described Menon as an "exceptional" founder with unique firsthand experience inside the payments systems of some of the largest global consumer subscription businesses. "We co-founded Butter with Vijay and the team to solve some of the most critical conversion and churn issues that all businesses face, large or small, and a short time in the company is off to an incredible start," he wrote via-email. |
| AWS launches a new tool for diagnosing and fixing database issues in its cloud Posted: 01 Dec 2021 09:12 AM PST AWS today announced a new service that makes it easier for its users to detect, diagnose and resolve issues in their relational databases. DevOps Guru for RDS, AWS’s fully managed relational database platform, is part of AWS’s DevOps Guru family, which launched last year with a service for detecting issues with machine learning services. As Swami Sivasubramanian, VP, Amazon AI, argued in his keynote today, being good at managing databases is not a differentiating factor for most businesses, so a lot of them naturally gravitate toward managed services in the cloud. But even so, these customers would still like to see more automation tools for managing these services, especially around diagnosing performance issues, Sivasubramanian noted.  Image Credits: TechCrunch “We asked ourselves, what if you could get alerts where there is a database issue — and also get the precise guidance, for instance?,” Sivasubramanian said. “What if you could be alerted to a database locking scenario that’s causing your ecommerce website to slow down — and be guided directly to the offending SQL statement?“ DevOps Guru for RDS helps these users detect issues when performance metrics spike for some reason. The service looks at the activity in the database and flags anything unusual. But what’s probably most important is that the service then also performs a root cause analysis to recommend changes and — whenever possible — it will even automatically remediate issues. |
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