Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Facebook closes political ads loophole ahead of US Presidential Election
OnePlus 8 Pro, OnePlus 8 to Go on Sale Today at 12 Noon in India
DOJ Inspector General report: DEA failed to police its agents' handling of cryptocurrencies, even after an agent stole $700,000 in bitcoin in 2015 (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)
DOJ Inspector General report: DEA failed to police its agents' handling of cryptocurrencies, even after an agent stole $700,000 in bitcoin in 2015 — The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) failed to adequately police its undercover agents' handling of cryptocurrency …
India to bar BSNL from sourcing gear from Huawei, ZTE
Why one email app went to war with Apple—and why neither one is right
Enlarge / The login screen for Hey on an iPhone XS. (credit: Samuel Axon)
Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson launched a firestorm of public criticism of Apple after Apple rejected an update to Basecamp's new email app. Hansson's tweet thread and the ensuing controversy surfaced days before Apple's annual developer conference, and amidst news that the European Commission has opened an antitrust probe of Apple and the App Store.
The app in question is Hey, an email tool that eschews tradition to offer a better experience for a certain type of user. It requires users to pay a $99 annual subscription fee to access its features and services but offers a free trial period.
Hey's 1.0 version was approved for launch on the App Store just this week, but it came under scrutiny at Apple when Basecamp attempted to deliver a 1.0.1 update with bug fixes. As events unfolded, a call and email came from Apple that indicated Hey would have to take steps toward making its subscription available through Apple's own billing system and in-app-payments platform. Otherwise, the app would be delisted from the store.
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Twitch launches its own free broadcasting software for Mac users
Back in November of last year, Twitch rolled out a beta build of Twitch Studio — a free, straightforward broadcasting app meant to be the first step for anyone curious about streaming on the service.
At launch, it was PC only. Today, however, they’re opening up the beta to Mac users.
Twitch is pretty open about its intended audience here; in an FAQ on the Mac beta release, they note that while it should be enough to get the ball rolling for new folks, they’re not looking to convert anyone who’s already happy with their current broadcasting setup. If you’re brand new to streaming, though, they want to walk you through it.
The app is something of a one-stop shop for the basic functionality a new streamer might be looking for on day one, wrapping into one cohesive view things like chat monitoring, an activity feed of new subscribers/followers and control of your stream’s layout.
The company also notes that the Mac version isn’t quite as full-featured as its PC counterpart, as “certain features are not possible on Mac.” The app can’t, for example, capture a game directly as it renders; instead, you’ll need to grant Twitch Studio the ability to capture your entire display. It might feel a bit hacky, but the end result should look mostly the same to viewers.
And for anyone looking to stream themselves playing some Brawl Stars or other mobile games: the Mac version of Twitch Studio can also capture feeds from an iOS device, assuming you’ve got it connected over USB.
T-Mobile says its massive outage on Monday was caused by failures of a leased third-party fiber circuit and its backup that resulted in an "IP traffic storm" (Sean Hollister/The Verge)
T-Mobile says its massive outage on Monday was caused by failures of a leased third-party fiber circuit and its backup that resulted in an “IP traffic storm” — “We did not meet our own bar for excellence,” writes T-Mobile's CTO — If you've been wondering what could knock …
Chinese brands, endorsers may go slow on promotions
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
US House panel to hold election-security hearing with Facebook, Google, Twitter
Snapdragon 690 announced: Qualcomm brings 5G to mid-range phones
Even if 5G is still something reserved for the flagships in India, Qualcomm is working to scale down 5G technology to more affordable segments. The San-Diego based company announced the Snapdragon 690, the first 5G chipset in the 6-series, although it only supports the slower sub-6GHz of 5G with the new Snapdragon X51 5G modem.
The Snapdragon 690 succeeds the gaming-centric Snapdragon 675 with the latest Arm Cortex A77 cores inside, along with support for 120Hz displays and 4K HDR video recording.
Based on an 8nm manufacturing process, Qualcomm promises a 20 per cent boost in CPU performance along with 60 percent faster graphics rendering, as compared to the Snapdragon 675. But the biggest addition is still the 5G modem inside, which makes it the first budget chipset from the company to support the next-generation connectivity. The 6-series chips are used in budget devices by Xiaomi, Moto, and Nokia and they are usually priced far more affordably than an 8-series or 7-series chipset.
Alongside 5G, there are a few more improvements as well. The Snapdragon 690 can support up to 192-megapixel cameras and support 4K HDR video capture. Both of these are a first for the 6-series. The chipset supports the AI-enabled smooth zoom as well. Furthermore, the chipset will have the capability to support a 120Hz display.
Yet, the Snapdragon 690 will still be relatively expensive. In India at least, the 6-series chipsets are used in the sub-$150 (roughly Rs 12,000) range, but Dipu John-Senior Director, Product Management at Qualcomm told us the chipset will be powering devices priced around $300-$500 (roughly Rs 22,000) range in the US. But then again, with no 5G available in India, OEMs will have less incentive to launch these devices in India, because the premium Qualcomm charges for the 5G bit will not be feasible in the face of competition from the Snapdragon 720 SoC or even the Snapdragon 730G, both of which power devices priced less than Rs 20,000.
Qualcomm said HMD Global, LG, Motorola and TCL are among the companies who are planning to launch devices powered by the new Snapdragon 690 and will be rolling out in the second half of 2020.
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Amnesty Sounds Privacy Alarm Over Gulf, Norway Coronavirus Tracing Apps
Facebook Closes Political Ads Loophole Ahead of US Presidential Election
Oppo Find X2 Series to Launch in India Today: How to Watch Live Stream
Outreach nabs $50M at a $1.33B valuation for software that helps with sales engagement
CRM software has become a critical piece of IT when it comes to getting business done, and today a startup focusing on one specific aspect of that stack — sales automation — is announcing a growth round of funding underscoring its own momentum. Outreach, which has built a popular suite of tools used by salespeople to help identify and reach out to prospects and improve their relationships en route to closing deals, has raised $50 million in a Series F round of funding that values the company at $1.33 billion.
The funding will be used to continue expanding geographically — headquartered in Seattle, Outreach also has an office in London and wants to do more in Europe and eventually Asia — as well as to invest in product development.
The platform today essentially integrates with a company’s existing CRM, be it Salesforce, or Microsoft’s, or Kustomer, or something else — and provides an SaaS-based set of tools for helping to source and track meetings, have to-hand information on sales targets, and a communications manager that helps with outreach calls and other communication in real-time. It will be investing in more AI around the product, such as its newest product Kaia (an acronym for “knowledge AI assistant”), and it has also hired a new CFO, Melissa Fisher, from Qualys, possibly a sign of where it hopes to go next as a business.
Sands Capital is leading the round, Outreach noted, with “strong participation” also Salesforce Ventures. Other investors include Operator Collective and repeat backers Lone Pine Capital, Spark Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Trinity Ventures, Mayfield, and Sapphire Ventures. The company has raised $289 million to date, and for some more context, this is definitely an upround: Outreach was last valued at $1.1 billion in its previous round in April 2019.
The funding comes on the heels of strong growth for the company: more than 4,000 businesses now use its tools, including Adobe, Tableau, DoorDash, Splunk, DocuSign, and SAP, making Outreach the biggest player in a field that also includes Salesloft (which also raised a significant round last year on the heels of Outreach’s), Clari, Chorus.ai, Gong, Conversica, and Afiniti. Its sweet spot has been working with technology-led businesses and that is a market that is continuing to expand, even as so much more of the economy has contracted in recent months.
“You are seeing a cambric explosion of B2B startups happening everywhere,” Manny Medina, CEO and co-founder of Outreach, said in a phone interview this week. “It means that sales roles are being created as we speak.” And that translates to a growing pool of potential customers for Outreach.
It wasn’t always this way.
When Outreach was first founded in 2011 in Seattle, it wasn’t a sales automation company. It was a recruitment startup called GroupTalent working on software to help source and hire talent, aimed at tech companies. That business was rolling along, until it wasn’t: it hit a wall in 2015 and the startup saw it had only two months of runway left, with little hope of raising more.
“We were not hitting our stride, and growth was hard. We didn’t make the numbers in 2014 and then had two months of cash left and no prospects of raising more,” Medina recalled. “So I sat down with my co-founders,” — Gordon Hempton, Andrew Kinzer and Wes Hather, none of whom are at the company anymore — “and we decided to sell our way out of it. We thought that if we generated more meetings we could gain more opportunities to try to sell our recruitment software.
“So we built the engine to do that, and we saw that we were getting 40% reply rates to our own outreaching emails. It was so successful we had a 10x increase in productivity. But we ran out of sales capacity, so we started selling the meetings we had managed to secure with potential talent directly to the tech companies themselves, who would have become their employers.”
That quickly tipped over into a business opportunity of its own. “Companies were saying to us, ‘I don’t want to buy the recruitment software. I need that sales engine!” The company never looked back, and changed its name to work for the pivot.
Fast forward to 2020, and times are challenging in a completely different way, defined as we are by a global health pandemic that affects what we do every day, where we go, how we work, how we interact with people, and much more.
Medina says that impact of the novel coronavirus has been a significant one for the company and its customers, in part because it fits well with two main types of usage cases that have emerged in the world of sales in the time of COVID-19.
“Older sellers now working from home are accomplished and don’t need to be babysat,” he said, but added but they can’t rely on their traditional touchpoints “like meetings, dinners, and bar mitzvahs” anymore to seal deals. “They don’t have the tools to get over the line. So our product is being called in to help them.”
Another group is at the other end of the spectrum, he said, are “younger and less experienced salespeople who don’t have the physical environment [many live in smaller places with roommates] nor experience to sell well alone. For them it’s been challenging not to come into an office because especially in smaller companies, they rely on each other to train, to listen to others on calls to learn how to sell.” That’s the other scenario where Outreach is finding up for a job and come into office.
Although a lot of sales tools are essentially taking on some of the more mundane jobs of salespeople, Medina doesn’t believe that we’re anywhere close to replacing the humans, even at this time when we’re seeing so many layoffs.
“We are at the early innings,” he said. “There are 6.8 million sales people and we only have north of 100,000 users, not even 2% of the market. There may be a redefinition of the role, but not a reduction.”
The distinction of business vs. consumer as a justification for Apple's rejection of HEY from the App Store for not using in-app purchases is flimsy (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)
The distinction of business vs. consumer as a justification for Apple's rejection of HEY from the App Store for not using in-app purchases is flimsy — This statement is paraphrased by Pierce, not a direct quote, but on its surface this business/consumer distinction seems untenable.
MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's, as the mobile chip designer bets on AI demand for growth (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia : MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
