Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: NoGood
NoGood CEO Mostafa Elbermawy describes how they evaluate a client’s growth challenges by quoting Zen teacher Hunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are only a few.” Rather than deferring to in-house playbooks, NoGood adopts an open mind combined with a methodical, data-driven approach to find untapped growth opportunities for its clients. Learn more about how NoGood came to be and why they’re willing to say no to potential clients.
On NoGood’s approach to growth:
“Our work is methodical. It’s intentional. We have to talk about it. We are very transparent about what we do and it’s completely process oriented. Hacking is a misnomer. Growth is not about clever shortcuts. It has to be sustainable and repeatable, and if it’s not, we won’t do it.”
On NoGood’s proudest accomplishment:
“They helped us launch our business. They are our CMO and our CTO. Would recommend to anyone.” Erica Tsypin, Washington D.C., Co-Founder & COO, Steer
“Our success in jumpstarting Steer’s business is one of our proudest accomplishments this year. Steer is an electric car subscription startup that asked us to increase their activations. Basically, our job was to generate new active members, which not only meant encouraging more users to download the app, upload a license, and get approved, but it also meant delivering a car to a member’s door, having them drive that car and leaving a review. We were able to demonstrate signup traction for Steer and help them launch in under three months.”
Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.
Interview with NoGood CEO and Growth Lead Mostafa Elbermawy
Yvonne Leow: To kick things off, how did you get into growth?
Mostafa Elbermawy: Well, I went to school for archaeology, but hieroglyphics weren’t paying the bills, so I taught myself how to code and started a web design studio after college. I started building websites for clients, and they started asking me how to drive more users to their sites to help grow their business.
I started tinkering with growth out of curiosity, and eventually joined the digital experience team at American Express. That job helped me gain some marketing and growth experience, and I ended up falling in love with that part of the job.
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Focals by North review: The future is (almost) here
The concept of an IRL heads-up display has been a part of science fiction since basically the beginning. Big players have tried their hand at it with less than stellar results — most notably Google with Glass, and more recently Intel’s Vaunt. But North may have cracked the nut on smart glasses with Focals.
They are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination — they’re slightly heavy and don’t feel quite as seamless as science fiction promised they would — but this may be the best pair of smart glasses yet.
Who
Focals were created by North, a Canadian company backed by Intel Capital, Spark Capital and the Amazon Alexa Fund with nearly $200 million in funding. Around the time Google Glass was released, founders Aaron Grant, Matthew Bailey and Stephen Lake were working on a smart arm band. They were disenchanted, as were many, with Glass and sought to make something better.
Their first priority? Make a great pair of glasses, then outfit them with technology. In order to do that, they had to allow for prescription lenses, which means the lenses of their product had to be curved. This throws a huge wrench in the idea of lens-projected notifications and content, so Focals created its own special projector.
The company also felt that the touchpad on the side of Google Glass was overly cumbersome, leading them to build the Focals Ring to let users navigate the menu.
What
The Focals are technically AR glasses, but they’re not focused on gaming or content consumption. The product is designed to move notifications from your phone to your sightline. It’s a bit like an Apple Watch for your face.
These notifications include the date and time, the weather, text notifications, email, Slack, Apple News alerts, Uber notifications, sports scores, turn-by-turn navigation and more. Users navigate this content using the Ring, outfitted with a nub of a joystick, which is meant to be worn on the index finger of your dominant hand.
Users can proactively seek information by clicking the joystick and scrolling, but the headset also serves up information in a push notification, including incoming messages and emails.
Importantly, North implemented a smart response system to keep users from having to pick up their phone each time they get a notification. The system gives users two options: choose from a list of smartly generated responses, or use speech-to-text through Focals’ built-in Alexa integration (the system is listening via built-in mic — but wearers have to opt-in during set up).
However, one of the great advantages for the Focals is also one of its weaknesses. The company chose to build a custom pair of glasses that could work with Rx lenses. That also means that the eyebox (the surface where you can see the projection) is smaller than other AR gadgets, which often use waveguides. In other words, your Focals have to be positioned pretty near perfectly to see the image. The company works hard to make sure that’s the case, fitting the glasses to your specific face. But glasses shift and move throughout the day, which means there’s plenty of re-adjusting in order to see the picture.
All that said, the Focals look surprisingly good. In fact, passersby would be hard-pressed to detect that they’re smart glasses in the first place. They aren’t comfortable enough to wear all day — the extra weight on the front means they get a bit uncomfortable after a few hours. But overall, these are pretty discreet as far as smart glasses go.
How
It’s a relatively time-consuming process to get your hands on a pair of Focals. Because the fit and size are so important to usability, users interested in purchasing a pair must go to one of North’s two stores (there’s one in Toronto, and one in Brooklyn, NY).
The visit to the store is by appointment. Upon arrival, store associates will take you into a booth where you’ll sit before 11 cameras that will 3D model your head, determining where your eyes and ears sit relative to the rest of your face. The cameras also try to understand your gaze.
From there, you get a demo with a standard (not fitted) pair of Focals, during which you learn how to align the Focals and use the Ring. It takes a few weeks for your custom-fit Focals to be ready to pick up, at which point you go through a final sizing with an optician.
It’s tedious, and will be difficult for the company to scale, but it’s part of what gives Focals an edge in quality. Luckily for folks outside of Toronto and NY, Focals is heading off on a pop-up tour. You can check out the tour dates and locations here.
Why
“Why?” is perhaps the toughest question to answer when it comes to the Focals. The goal, as outlined by the company, is to keep you connected to the digital world without taking you out of the real world. In short, stop looking down at your phone.
That said, Focals also take away the option. When your phone rings, or even when your Apple Watch buzzes, you have a choice to make: look down, or ignore. When you’re wearing the Focals, that decision is eliminated.
For this reason, I feel like this product is meant for early adopters and folks who enjoy being ultra-connected to the digital world. If you’re already addicted to the sweet chime of your phone, the Focals may very well keep you more connected to the real world, and potentially save your neck from some stiffness. But if you do well to live in the real world and don’t appreciate the constant flow of notifications to your phone, the Focals likely won’t help you maintain that separation.
There are also some minor issues with the Focals themselves. The Ring isn’t super comfortable, particularly when typing on a computer (something most of us spend hours each day doing). The Ring also seems like something that would be very easy to lose or break — this hasn’t happened to me yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. (For now, North is replacing broken Rings for free.)
With the Focals themselves, I’d like to be clear when I say that I was pleasantly surprised with the overall experience. The UI is pleasant to look at, and the little chime of a notification that whispers in your ear is most certainly addictive.
However, I found my eyes getting tired after more than an hour wearing the Focals. Using the Focals means that you’re constantly changing the focus of your eyes from close to far away, which can be tiring. Moreover, if the glasses shift a bit on your face, the text of the notification can become fuzzy, making the experience even more tiring.
Plus, the glasses are built to bend halfway through the arms, as opposed to where the arms meet the frames. This means you can’t hang the Focals off the front of your shirt, which is an admittedly minor gripe, but it bugged me throughout the review process.
Add to that the fact that Focals start at $600 and this product is really for technophiles. For now.
North is on the right track. The company is constantly developing new features that are released each week — they recently launched Google Fit support to check your steps, as well as language lessons to brush up on your French during your walk to work. And they’ve started with the right priorities in mind. The Focals are fine looking glasses, and in general, the tech works. Now it’s about refinement.
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4 days left to score the best price on Disrupt SF 2019
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you an important message: You have just four days left to buy your pass to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 before the super early-bird price expires on June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
There’s a pass priced for every budget (even yours), and you can spread your payments over time when you select the payment plan option during checkout. But once that deadline hits you can kiss up to $1,800 in savings goodbye. Disrupt SF 2019 offers fantastic ROI at any price, but why pay more? Buy your pass now to make the most of your investment.
Speaking of investments, we’re thrilled to partner yet again with All Raise, a startup nonprofit focused on accelerating female founder and funder success. Don’t miss this mini-series of 30 ask-me-anything sessions. You’ll connect with other entrepreneurs and have a chance to ask top investors, well, anything. You’ll find more details and sign-up information here.
Come to Disrupt ready to network with more than 10,000 attendees. If that sounds a tad daunting, fear not. CrunchMatch, our free business match-making service, takes the pain out of networking — and saves your aching feet, too. It helps you find and connect with the right people based on mutual business criteria, goals and interests. Search, find, schedule, meet. It’s that simple.
Nothing but opportunity awaits in Startup Alley. More than a thousand early-stage startups and exhibitors will fill the exhibit hall and showcase a wealth of tech products, services and talent. Want to exhibit there? We have two options for you.
Purchase a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package or you can apply to the TC Top Picks program and exhibit in Startup Alley for free. Applications for TC Top Picks close on July 19, and you have until September 13 to buy your Disrupt SF Startup Alley Exhibitor Package.
And of course don’t miss the crown jewel of every Disrupt: Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s epic pitch competition. You can watch it live and cheer on your favorites or you can apply to compete — just be sure to fill out the Startup Battlefield application by June 25th at 11:59 p.m. (PT).
So many great reasons to attend Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Since you’re going, why not get the best ticket price possible? The super early-bird price expires on June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Buy your pass today, and we’ll see you in October!
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Orbit Fab becomes first startup to supply water to ISS, paving the way for satellite refueling
Not even two years into its existence, orbital fuel supply startup Orbit Fab has chalked up a big win — successfully supplying the International Space Station with water, a first for any private company. It’s a big deal, because providing water to the ISS involved a multi-day refueling process, done in microgravity, using processes and equipment Orbit Fab developed itself.
The key ingredient here, per ISS U.S. National Laboratory COO Kenneth Shields, which was the contracting agency for Orbit Fab’s refueling test, is that this method of resupply is totally out of spec in terms of how this process was designed to work on the ISS. By creating and successfully demonstrating a system that the ISS designers never conceived, Orbit Fab has shown that both private companies and NASA have the flexibility needed to build business models on existing space infrastructure.
The technology Orbit Fab developed and demonstrated has broader applications than just moving water around in space. Water was used in this example specifically because it’s one of the most inert propellants used in spaceflight thrusters, but the methods could extend to other common propellants, and make it possible to refuel satellites in orbit. Orbit Fab is working toward establishing standards for satellite refueling interfaces to be used in orbital hardware, which could go a long way toward making it common practice to develop reusable satellites, instead of sticking with the more or less disposable hardware model used today.
Startups like Orbit Fab are the key to unlocking true commercialization of space, by identifying points in the value chain where innovation or improvement can lead to cost or resource efficiencies and ensure that space business is actually also viable business, in terms of profit potential.
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Dr. Mario is in (on iOS and Android) July 10
After years of heel dragging, Nintendo finally opened itself up to the smartphone world in late-2016. The gaming giant hasn’t exactly opened the floodgates in the intervening years, but Fire Emblem Heroes, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and Dragalia Lost have filled the void in some form or other.
There’s something to be said for the company’s thoughtful approach to the category. Nintendo clearly values its IP and is only interested in releasing games that make sense on the platform. Dr. Mario is pretty high on that list. After all, similar puzzle-style games have come to dominate the mobile platform, and Nintendo had a perfectly good title gathering dust.
Dr. Mario World was unveiled back in February — or the title was, at least — with a broad summer release for iOS and Android. Last night, Nintendo offered a deeper glimpse in the form of a YouTube video. The basics of the game are similar to the original NES title, with falling capsules that disappear when colors are matched up. Kind of like Tetris, but with more drugs.
The graphics have been improved, of course, along with a social element that lets user connect around the world in networks like Facebook. Mario is joined by “friends,” as well, including familiar characters like Princess Peach, Luigi and Bowser, all of whom apparently studied medicine in whatever sort of universities they have in the mushroom kingdom.
The game will be available on July 10, beating the previously announced Mario Kart Tour, which is also said to be due out this summer.
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GoTenna is ramping up public sector mesh networking with a $24M C round
GoTenna is best known for its outdoors-oriented consumer products that let you text and share locations between smartphones off the grid. But the company has found that government work — military, fire, rescue — is the real market, and is pursuing it with a vengeance on the strength of a $24 million funding round.
“We’ve been busy!” said Daniela Perdomo, founder and CEO of the company, in an interview. “We have a good problem, which is a technology that can be so foundationally enabling for so many use cases.”
GoTenna’s core tech is mesh networking over radio frequencies normally used for walkie-talkies: long range but low bandwidth. Yet if all you need to send are GPS coordinates or a short message, it’s perfectly sufficient and works great where mobile and satellite connections are impractical. Just turn on the device, smaller than a deck of cards, and you can chat over miles in the middle of nowhere with your climbing partners or back-country ski pals.
In the last couple of years the company has shifted its priorities from consumer tech — the GoTenna and Mesh series of gadgets — to filling the needs of public-sector clients that have been asking for something like this for years.
Firefighters, military operations, local law enforcement, search and rescue — many were using bulky, over-engineered, expensive solutions that haven’t changed much in decades. GoTenna works with nearly any smartphone and instantly creates a mesh network that can span miles, making it perfect for off-grid communications.
Perdomo said this was actually more or less the plan from the beginning.
“It was in my first-ever pitch deck when we raised our seed in 2013, there was this blue-sky vision of how the technology would be used,” she told me. “But it was simpler to launch an MVP to consumers. We always felt that product was going to bring in the public sector. And that’s exactly what happened — when we launched our first-generation product, I think within 24 hours we had a variety of different public sector customers reach out to us.”
“We now have some federal agencies that have been customers through every generation of the product. We sill have our consumer product, and people love it, but it’s a small part of our business compared to the public sector,” she said.
An example of how the interface might look in use. It can relay the locations of other GoTenna devices at intervals, helping teams keep in touch automatically.
While disaster response crews could of course just buy a couple dozen of the regular GoTenna products, they were quick to ask for “pro” versions with features prized by advanced users and military customers.
Longer range, more programmable wireless parameters, compatibility with various legacy systems — the Pro and new ProX versions of the GoTenna system hit a lot of sweet spots. As Perdomo told me when the Pro first came out, legacy systems are powerful in some ways but can also be horribly expensive, incompatible with foreign wireless systems or even have legal restrictions on where they can be used.
For a cash-strapped NGO that goes around doing global aid, a $100-$500 gadget that turns an ordinary phone into a versatile mesh node is potentially game-changing. (You can also use them to temporarily replace destroyed communications infrastructure.)
But deep-pocketed federal agencies and military branches are also shelling out for the devices, and increasingly for the software support contracts that go with them. GoTenna’s Aspen Grove is a proprietary mesh network protocol that they’ve engineered to be faster and more robust than anything else out there. I’d exert a little skepticism here normally, but from what I’ve seen, the systems GoTenna is replacing or augmenting aren’t exactly competitive.
In fact, GoTenna’s next major hardware project is to create a mesh networking board that can be integrated right into existing hardware, simplifying the systems and baking its protocols in even deeper.
“We have a long list of companies that want to integrate our tech into vehicles, aircraft, anything you can think of,” Perdomo said. “So you can put one of these babies on a UAV and let ‘er rip! Our record range, point to point from a UAV, is 69 miles.”
Meanwhile the company is also releasing a broader open-source mesh platform called Lot 49 that’s meant to be capable of supporting a global messaging infrastructure without relying on any wireless providers. That could be a big deal for Internet of Things-type devices as well.
Interestingly, Perdomo doesn’t feel threatened by the new and rather scary kid on the block: communications satellite constellations like Starlink and OneWeb. If the idea is that GoTenna lets you communicate where the grid doesn’t reach, what happens when the grid is global?
“No matter how many satellites you put up, repeaters you put up, cables you lay down, you always have that last mile. You need resiliency, access, and I believe neutrality as well,” she said. And indeed you’re not going to take a Starlink ground station with you on a covert operation or into an active wildfire. And having an existing, ongoing business agreement with a satellite communications provider may not even be desirable in the first place.
“There’s a reason why certain incumbents in the tactical radio space as well as carriers are partnering with us,” Perdomo pointed out — and indeed Comcast Ventures is a new face among the investors. “We’re creating a new layer in the communications stack, mesh networks with a focus on bursty data. I think of us as perfectly complementary to every other communications company.”
As for that funding, it will go toward easing the rapid growth the company is experiencing, finishing the pro and embedded options, hiring up and expanding operations to support their growing services business. The $24 million round was led by Founders Fund, with participation from Comcast Ventures and existing investors Union Square Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Walden VC, MentorTech and Bloomberg Beta.
“We’ve been in R&D for a really long time,” Perdomo said. “It’s exciting now to also be becoming a business. All of the most impressive mainstream telecommunications technologies we use today, things like the internet or GPS, they hit it out of the park with the public sector first. If you can win there, in life or death situations, you know you can win everywhere else as well.”
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Youper, a chatbot that helps users navigate their emotions, raises $3 million in seed funding
Youper, a mental health app with a chatbot it calls an “emotional health assistant,” has raised $3 million in seed funding from Goodwater Capital. The funds will be used to accelerate development of Youper’s artificial intelligence-based capabilities and grow its user base.
Based in San Francisco, Youper was co-founded in 2016 by Dr. Jose Hamilton. For a decade, Hamilton worked as a psychiatrist in clinical settings, seeing more than 3,000 patients. While talking to them, he realized that a handful of barriers kept many people from seeking help earlier, even if they had dealt with anxiety or depression for years.
“The first one is fear, taking care of yourself, talking about your mental health, understanding your mental health,” he tells TechCrunch. “Seeing a therapist or psychiatrist is super intimidating. That’s why all of my patients used to say the same things. The second barrier is cost, of course. Psychiatrists and therapists are super expensive.”
Hamilton teamed up with co-founders Diego Couto, the startup’s chief product and growth officer, and Thiago Marafon, its CTO, to create an app that would make mental healthcare less intimidating and more accessible. They originally created an app that did not have a conversational interface. Instead, Hamilton says it took a similar approach to Calm and Headspace. But that resulted in a very low user engagement rate and, after a year, the team realized Youper needed to provide a more personalized experience, matching users to the right psychological techniques, including cognitive behavioral techniques and mindfulness, for their needs.
Youper is part of a growing roster of apps that use AI-based chatbots to help users improve their emotional health, including Woebot, Wysa and X2’s Tess. Hamilton says Youper wants to differentiate with its focus on personalization, combining mental health research and user data to match the right psychological techniques with users.
Screenshots from Youper, an app for emotional well-being.
The startup claims Youper has been downloaded more than one million times so far. Most of its users are young adults, and there are more women than men who use Youper.
“I think that’s because women are facing new challenges in our society by conquering new spaces and assuming new roles, and that poses an emotional toll. Another reason is that women are more tuned into self-care than men,” he says. “Sometimes I feel that we men wait for too long suffering in silence.”
For users who have never consulted with a provider, Youper provides a gentle introduction to the types of questions and exercises they might experience in therapy. The questions and exercises given by Youper’s chatbot are meant to help users achieve a better understanding of their emotions, thoughts and behavior.
Youper’s chatbot asks users to focus on their thoughts and identify how they are feeling from a menu of descriptive words. Then a scale lets them rate the strength of that emotion from “slightly” to “extremely.” More questions help them narrow down what is causing those feelings and track their mood. Users are also given options for mindfulness exercises and journaling prompts.
Hamilton says that the average time users spend during each session with its chatbot is about seven minutes, with 80% reporting a reduction in negative moods after one conversation. The startup also claims that after 30 days, a quarter of people who signed up for Youper are still active users.
Youper is currently free, though the company may test a freemium model in the future with premium features. It uses anonymized user data in its own research to improve Youper, but keeps it private and does not share or sell user data or information.
Of course, an app is not a replacement for seeing a therapist or psychiatrist, but Youper presents a much lower barrier to entry for people who worried about the stigma of seeing a professional. Hamilton says he hopes using Youper will encourage more people to seek medical treatment sooner if they need it by making them more comfortable with the idea of discussing their emotional health.
“On average, it takes 10 years for someone to finally talk to a health provider. This could become 10 minutes with an app like Youper,” Hamilton says. “Having an app with a super low barrier to entry, no stigma, something that is about emotional health and taking care of yourself, shows that you don’t need to be afraid.”
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Amazon’s Twitch acquired social networking platform Bebo for up to $25M to bolster its esports efforts
While Facebook makes a bold move into cryptocurrency to capitalise on its multi-billion user base, a social network that was once a credible competitor to it has quietly been snapped up by a subsidiary of Amazon. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Bebo, one of the earlier platforms to let people share thoughts and media with their friends, has been acquired by Twitch, the streaming video platform owned by Amazon. Together the two will be working on building out Twitch’s esports business, and specifically Twitch Rivals.
A spokesperson for Twitch confirmed the acquisition, which includes both people (around 10 employees) and IP, but declined to provide further comment.
From what we understand from our sources, Twitch paid up to $25 million for the company earlier this month, after beating out at least two other bidders, Discord (which itself has been building out its own esports business), and… wait for it… Facebook. (Our source says the latter offered $20 million.) Indeed, LinkedIn profiles for ex-Bebo employees — see here, here, and here — now at Twitch note June as the changeover date. (Note: original sources say $25 million, others close to the deal say it was materially less than this. As you know, these things can be described differently depending on who is doing the describing.)
It has been a long and winding road for Bebo over the years. Starting out way back in 2005 by Michael and Xochi Birch as an early social networking site, Bebo quickly became the market leader in a couple of English-speaking countries, specifically UK and Ireland.
Bebo’s growth trajectory and the bigger opportunity in social were enough to get it acquired for about $850 million by AOL back in 2008, apparently beating out a number of other interested large tech and media companies interested in getting their own social media platform and the audience that would come with it (disclaimer: AOL eventually also acquired TechCrunch, too).
But the deal was a certifiable dud, with Bebo never managing to build on its early traction, and AOL not being in a position to know how to fix that. Less than two years later, it was sold on to Criterion Capital for $25 million.
Yet as the social wheels continued to turn, and even once-global market leader MySpace also fell back as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other mobile-friendly platforms pulled out ahead, even that $25 million price turned out to be too high. After Bebo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the original founders, the Birches, bought it back in 2013 for $1 million with a pledge to reinvent it.
And so they did, putting in place a small team led by Shaan Puri, who worked on a number of ideas to see which of them could fly. (And I don’t know if this was a tongue in cheek joke about how challenging they knew the task would be, but it seems that the holding company set up to house some of the IP and legal aspects of the endeavor was called “Pigs in Flight.”)
The new app studio effort, which went by the name Monkey Inferno (another great one), came out of the gates with “Blab”, a “walkie-talkie” ephemeral video messaging service, which picked up millions of users quickly but found it hard to retain them. It shut down a year later, and it looks like Monkey Inferno dabbled in a few other things before coming to esports.
From social networking to socialising esports
In that last pivot, Bebo first tried out streaming services for esports players, but that proved to be tough competition against dominant platforms like OBS and Xsplit. Then, in an interesting nod to its earlier history in social networking and organising groups of friends, it shifted once more, into organising and running tournaments for streamers, with leagues and more: the streams ran on Twitch and Bebo organised viewers, leagues and other things around that.
That site, Bebo.com, is now offline, and all its tweets seem to have been deleted, but the idea was to build out leagues and tournaments for any and all kinds of groups and players, for example complete beginners, or high school students.
It was the last of these that turned out to line up with a growing market segment.
According to a report in eMarketer, esports attracted some 400 million users in 2018 and pulled in revenues of $869 million from sponsorships, player fees and advertising, and it is projected to be worth between $1.58 billion and $2.96 billion by 2022. And Bebo was helping organise and build those communities.
And that is now linking up neatly with Twitch, which had been developing its own casual esports operation in the form of Twitch Rivals. This launched in beta in 2018 and is now widely available wherever Twitch is.
The Bebo tech and its team are now both being put to use on Twitch Rivals, to help continue expanding it with more features and more users. To be clear, though, it seems there is no intention — from what I understand — to parlay Bebo’s past efforts in social networking into a wider social networking play at Twitch: the focus is on esports.
Still, the acquisition comes at a key moment. Since January, there have been reports that Amazon is working on a new game streaming service (just like Apple, Google and others), which likely won’t be out until next year. While there is no news on that today, you can see how expanding the variety and breadth of content on Twitch by way of esports leagues and tournaments fits in with a wider effort to bring more regular, engaged users into the Amazon fold, using this as one of the big draws.
(Updated with more detail on the price.)
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Anti-spam service Truecaller adds free voice calling feature
Truecaller, an app best known for helping users screen calls from strangers and spammers, is adding yet another feature to its service as it bolsters its super app status. The Stockholm-based firm said today that its app can now be used to place free VoIP-powered voice calls.
The company told TechCrunch on Tuesday that it has started to roll out the free voice calling feature to its Android users. It expects the rollout to reach all Android users in the coming days. The feature, which currently only supports calls between two users, will arrive on its iOS app soon.
In emerging markets such as India, where 100 million of Truecaller’s 140 million users live, free voice calls has been a long-sought after feature. Until late 2016, voice calls were fairly expensive in India, with telecom operators counting revenue from traditional calls as their biggest profit generator.
But in last two and a half years, things have changed dramatically for hundreds of millions of people in India after Reliance Jio, a telecom operator owned by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, launched its network with free voice calls and low-priced data services. Reliance Jio has already amassed over 300 million users to become one of the top three telcos in the nation.
Yet, the quality of network still leaves much to be desired in India as traditional calls drop abruptly and run into quality issues more often than one would like. Truecaller said that its voice calls rely on data services — mobile data and Wi-Fi — and claimed that they can work swiftly even on patchy network.
The addition of voice calling functionality comes as Truecaller aggressively looks to expand its business. The service, which offers both ad-support free tier and subscription bundle, has added messaging, mobile payments, and call recording features in recent years. Earlier this year, it also added a crediting option, allowing users in India to borrow a few hundred dollars.
A representative with the company said Truecaller began exploring the free voice calling feature a few months ago. It began testing the new functionality with alpha and beta test group users four weeks ago. It now plans to introduce group voice calling support soon, the company said.
With the new feature, Truecaller now competes even more closely with WhatsApp . The Facebook-owned app has become ubiquitous in India with more than three-quarters of India’s smartphone base using the app. WhatsApp added voice calling feature to its app in 2015. Last year, Facebook said users around the world were spending 2 billion minutes per day on WhatsApp video and audio calls.
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MongoDB gets a data lake, new security features and more
MongoDB is hosting its developer conference today and, unsurprisingly, the company has quite a few announcements to make. Some are straightforward, like the launch of MongoDB 4.2 with some important new security features, while others, like the launch of the company’s Atlas Data Lake, point the company beyond its core database product.
“Our new offerings radically expand the ways developers can use MongoDB to better work with data,” said Dev Ittycheria, the CEO and president of MongoDB. “We strive to help developers be more productive and remove infrastructure headaches — with additional features along with adjunct capabilities like full-text search and data lake. IDC predicts that by 2025 global data will reach 175 Zettabytes and 49% of it will reside in the public cloud. It’s our mission to give developers better ways to work with data wherever it resides, including in public and private clouds.”
The highlight of today’s set of announcements is probably the launch of MongoDB Atlas Data Lake. Atlas Data Lake allows users to query data, using the MongoDB Query Language, on AWS S3, no matter their format, including JSON, BSON, CSV, TSV, Parquet and Avro. To get started, users only need to point the service at their existing S3 buckets. They don’t have to manage servers or other infrastructure. Support for Data Lake on Google Cloud Storage and Azure Storage is in the works and will launch in the future.
Also new is Full-Text Search, which gives users access to advanced text search features based on the open-source Apache Lucene 8.
In addition, MongoDB is also now starting to bring together Realm, the mobile database product it acquired earlier this year, and the rest of its product lineup. Using the Realm brand, Mongo is merging its serverless platform, MongoDB Stitch, and Realm’s mobile database and synchronization platform. Realm’s synchronization protocol will now connect to MongoDB Atlas’ cloud database, while Realm Sync will allow developers to bring this data to their applications.
“By combining Realm’s wildly popular mobile database and synchronization platform with the strengths of Stitch, we will eliminate a lot of work for developers by making it natural and easy to work with data at every layer of the stack, and to seamlessly move data between devices at the edge to the core backend,” explained Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB.
As for the latest release of MongoDB, the highlight of the release is a set of new security features. With this release, Mongo is implementing client-side Field Level Encryption. Traditionally, database security has always relied on server-side trust. This typically leaves the data accessible to administrators, even if they don’t have client access. If an attacker breaches the server, that’s almost automatically a catastrophic event.
With this new security model, Mongo is shifting access to the client and to the local drivers. It provides multiple encryption options; for developers to make use of this, they will use a new “encrypt” JSON scheme attribute.
This ensures that all application code can generally run unmodified, and even the admins won’t get access to the database or its logs and backups unless they get client access rights themselves. Because the logic resides in the drivers, the encryption is also handled totally separate from the actual database.
Other new features in MongoDB 4.2 include support for distributed transactions and the ability to manage MongoDB deployments from a single Kubernetes control plane.
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