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How do startups actually get their content marketing to work?

Published April 13, 2019

[Editor’s note: this is a free example of a series of articles we’re publishing by top experts who have cutting-edge startup advice to offer, over on Extra Crunch. Get in touch at ec_columns@techcrunch.com if you have ideas to share.]

Even the best growth marketers fail to get content marketing to work. Many are unwittingly using tactics from 4 years ago that no longer work today.

This post cuts through the noise by sharing real-world data behind some of the biggest SEO successes this year.

It studies the content marketing performance of clients with Growth Machine and Bell Curve (my company) — two marketing agencies who have helped grow Perfect Keto, Tovala, Framer, Crowd Cow, Imperfect Produce, and over a hundred others.

What content do their clients write about, how do they optimize that content to rank well (SEO), and how do they convert their readers into customers?

You’re about to see how most startups manage their blogs the wrong way.

Reference CupAndLeaf.com as we go along. Their tactics for hitting 150,000 monthly visitors will be explored.

Write fewer, more in-depth articles

In the past, Google wasn’t skilled at identifying and promoting high quality articles. Their algorithms were tricked by low-value, “content farm” posts.

That is no longer the case.

Today, Google is getting close to delivering on its original mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In other words, they now reliably identify high quality articles. How? By monitoring engagement signals: Google can detect when a visitor hits the Back button in their browser. This signals that the reader quickly bounced from the article after they clicked to read it.

If this occurs frequently for an article, Google ranks that article lower. It deems it low quality.

For example, below is a screenshot of the (old) Google Webmaster Tools interface. It visualizes this quality assessment process: It shows a blog post with the potential to rank for the keyword “design packaging ideas.” Google initially ranked it at position 25.

However, since readers weren’t engaging with the content as time went on, Google incrementally ranked the article lower — until it completely fell off the results page:

The lesson? Your objective is to write high quality articles that keep readers engaged. Almost everything else is noise.

In studying our clients, we’ve identified four rules for writing engaging posts.

1. Write articles for queries that actually prioritize articles.

Not all search queries are best served by articles.

Below, examine the results for “personalized skincare:”

Notice that Google is prioritizing quizzes. Not articles.

So if you don’t perform a check like this before writing an article on “personalized skincare,” there’s a good chance you’re wasting your time. Because, for some queries, Google has begun prioritizing local recommendations, videos, quizzes, or other types of results that aren’t articles.

Sanity check this before you sit down to write.

2. Write titles that accurately depict what readers get from the content.

Are incoming readers looking to buy a product? Then be sure to show them product links.

Or, were they looking for a recipe? Provide that.

Make your content deliver on what your titles imply a reader will see. Otherwise, readers bounce. Google will then notice the accumulating bounces, and you’ll be penalized.

3. Write articles that conclude the searcher’s experience.

Your objective is to be the last site a visitor visits in their search journey.

Meaning, if they read your post then don’t look at other Google result, Google infers that your post gave the searcher what they were looking for. And that’s Google’s prime directive: get searchers to their destination through the shortest path possible.

The two-part trick for concluding the searcher’s journey is to:

Go sufficiently in-depth to cover all the subtopics they could be looking for.

Link to related posts that may cover the tangential topics they seek.

This is what we use Clearscope for — it ensures we don’t miss critical subtopics that help our posts rank:

4. Write in-depth yet concise content.

In 2019, what do most of the top-ranked blogs have in common?

They skip filler introductions, keep their paragraphs short, and get to the point.

And, to make navigation seamless, they employ a “table of contents” experience:

Be like them, and get out of the reader’s way. All our best-performing blogs do this.

Check out more articles by Julian Shapiro over on Extra Crunch, including “What’s the cost of buying users from Facebook and 13 other ad networks?” and “Which types of startups are most often profitable?”

Prioritize engagement over backlinks

In going through our data, the second major learning was about “backlinks”, which is marketing jargon for a link to your site from someone else’s.

Four years ago, the SEO community was focused on backlinks and Domain Ranking (DR) — an indication of how many quality sites link to yours (scored from 0 to 100). At the time, they were right to be concerned about backlinks.

Today, our data reveals that backlinks don’t matter as much as they used to. They certainly help, but you need great content behind them.

Most content marketers haven’t caught up to this.

Here’s a screenshot showing how small publishers can beat out large behemoths today — with very little Domain Ranking:

The implication is that, even without backlinks, Google is still happy to rank you highly. Consider this: They don’t need your site to be linked from TechCrunch for their algorithm to determine whether visitors are engaged on your site.

Remember: Google has Google Analytics, Google Search, Google Ads, and Google Chrome data to monitor how searchers engage with your site. Believe me, if they want to find out whether your content is engaging, they can find a way. They don’t need backlinks to tell them.

This is not to say that backlinks are useless.

Our data shows they still provide value, just much less. Notably, they get your pages “considered” by Google sooner: If you have backlinks from authoritative and relevant sites, Google will have the confidence to send test traffic to your pages in perhaps a few weeks instead of in a few months.

Here’s what I mean by “test traffic:” In the weeks after publishing your post, Google notices them then experimentally surfaces them at the top of related search terms. They then monitor whether searchers engage with the content (i.e. don’t quickly hit their Back button). If the engagement is engaging, they’ll increasingly surface your articles. And increase your rankings over time.

Having good backlinks can cut this process down from months to a few weeks.

Prioritize conversion over volume

Engagement isn’t your end goal. It’s the precursor to what ultimately matters: getting a signup, subscribe, or purchase. (Marketers call this your “conversion event.”) Visitors can take a few paths to your conversion event:

Short: They read the initial post then immediately convert.

Medium: They read the initial post plus a few more before eventually converting.

Long (most common): They subscribe to your newsletter and/or return later.

To increase the ratio at which readers take the short and medium paths, optimize your blog posts’ copy, design, and calls to action. We’ve identified two rules for doing this.

1. Naturally segue to your pitch

Our data shows you should not pitch your product until the back half of your post.

Why? Pitching yourself in the intro can taint the authenticity of your article.

Also, the further a reader gets into a good article, the more familiarity and trust they’ll accrue for your brand, which means they’re less likely to ignore your pitch once they encounter it.

2. Don’t make your pitch look like an ad

Most blogs make their product pitches look like big, show-stopping banner ads.

Our data shows this visual fanfare is reflexively ignored by readers.

Instead, plug your product using a normal text link — styled no differently than any other link in your post. Woodpath, a health blog with Amazon products to pitch, does this well.

Think in funnels, not in pageviews

Finally, our best-performing clients focus less on their Google Analytics data and more on their readers’ full journeys: They encourage readers to provide their email so they can follow up with a series of “drip” emails. Ideally, these build trust in the brand and get visitors to eventually convert.

They “retarget” readers with ads. This entails pitching them with ads for the products that are most relevant to the topics they read on the blog. (Facebook and Instagram provide the granular control necessary to segment traffic like this.) You can read my growth marketing handbook to learn more about running retargeting ads well.

Here’s why retargeting is high-leverage: In running Facebook and Instagram ads for over a hundred startups, we’ve found that the cost of a retargeting purchase is one third the cost of a purchase from ads shown to people who haven’t yet been to our site.

Our data shows that clients who earn nothing from their blog traffic can sometimes earn thousands by simply retargeting ads to their readers.

Recap

It’s possible for a blog with 50,000 monthly visitors to earn nothing.

So, prioritize visitor engagement over volume: Make your hero metrics your revenue per visitor and your total revenue. That’ll keep your eye on the intermediary goals that matter: Attracting visitors with an intent to convert

Keeping those visitors engaged on the site

Then compelling them to convert

In short, your goal is to help Google do its job: Get readers where they need to go with the least amount of friction in their way.

Be sure to check out more articles from Julian Shapiro over on Extra Crunch, and get in touch with the Extra Crunch editors if you have cutting-edge startup advice to share with our subscribers, at ec_columns@techcrunch.com.

Twitch’s first game, the karaoke-style ‘Twitch Sings,’ launches to public

Published April 13, 2019

Amazon-owned game-streaming site Twitch is today publicly launching its first game. But it’s not a traditional video game — like those the site’s creators stream for their fans. Instead, the new game is called “Twitch Sings” and is a free karaoke-style experience designed for live streaming.

The game, which was launched into beta last year, includes thousands of karaoke classics that players can sing either alone or in a duet with another person. In addition, streamers can choose to sing as themselves in a live camera feed, or they can create a personalized avatar that will appear in their place. (The songs are licensed from karaoke content providers, not the major labels.)

But unlike other karaoke-style apps — like TikTok or its clones — Twitch Sings is designed to be both live-streamed and interactive. That is, viewers are also a part of the experience as they can request songs, cheer with emotes to activate light shows and virtual ovations and send in “singing challenges” to the streamer during the performance. For example, they could challenge them to sing without the lyrics or “sing like a cat,” and other goofy stuff.

“Twitch Sings unites the fun and energy of being at a live show with the boundless creativity of streamers to make an amazing shared interactive performance,” said Joel Wade, executive producer of Twitch Sings, in a statement. “Many games are made better on Twitch, but we believe there is a huge opportunity for those that are designed with streaming and audience participation at their core.”

The game is designed to not only capitalize on Twitch’s live-streaming capabilities, but to also engage Twitch viewers who tune in to watch, but don’t stream themselves.

More notably, it’s a means of expanding Twitch beyond gaming. This is something Twitch has attempted to do for years — starting with the launch of a section on its site for creative content back in 2015. It has also in the past tried to cater to vloggers, and has partnered with various media companies in order to stream marathons of fan favorites — like Bob Ross’s painting series or Julia Child’s cooking show, for example. Its own studio has produced non-gaming shows like the one about sneakers. Last year, Twitch partnered with Disney Digital Network to bring some of its larger personalities over to Twitch, as well.

Those efforts haven’t really helped Twitch break out with the non-gamer crowd.

Karaoke may not do the trick either. In reality, this “game” is more of a test to see if Twitch can turn some of its platform features — like its chat system and custom interactive video overlays — into tools to help increase engagement among existing users and attract new ones. It still remains to be seen if and how the game actually takes off.

The game was unveiled today at TwitchCon Berlin, where the company announced it had added more than 127,000 Affiliates and 3,600 new Partners in Europe since the beginning of 2018.

The company also detailed a few other updates for Twitch creators, including those across payments, streaming and discovery tools.

Starting Monday, April 15, Twitch will pay out in just 15 days after the close of the month, instead of 45, eligible creators that reached the $100 threshold. In May, it will make the Bounty Board (paid sponsorship opps) available to Partners and Affiliates in Germany, France and the U.K., and will partner Borderlands 3, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 and Unilever, in Europe.

In June, Twitch is also rolling out faster search, automated highlight reels (recaps) and the ability to sort through channels in a directory by a range of new options — including lowest to highest viewers, most recently started or suggested channels based on their viewing history.

TwitchCon Europe 2019 is streaming live this weekend at twitch.tv/twitch.

Startups Weekly: Lessons from a failed founder

Published April 13, 2019

I sat down with Menlo Ventures partner Shawn Carolan this week to talk about his early investment in Uber. Menlo, if you remember, led Uber’s Series B and has made a hefty sum over the year selling shares in the ride-hailing company. I’ll have more on that later; for now, I want to share some of the insights Carolan had on his experience ditching venture capital to become a founder.

Around when Menlo made its first investment in Uber, Carolan began taking a step back from the firm and building Handle, a startup that built tools to help people be more productive. Despite years of hard work, Handle was ultimately a failure. Carolan said he shed a lot of tears over its demise, but used the experience to connect more intimately with founders and to offer them more candid, authentic advice.

“People in the valley are always achievement-oriented; it’s always about the next thing and crushing it and whatever,” Carolan told TechCrunch. “When [Handle] shut down, I had this spreadsheet of all the people who I felt like I disappointed: Seed investors who invested in me, all the people at Menlo and my friends who had tweeted out early stuff. It was a long spreadsheet of like 60 people. And when I started a sabbatical, what I said was I’m going to go connect with everyone and apologize.”

Today, Carolan encourages founders to own their vulnerabilities.

“It’s OK to admit when you’re wrong,” he said. “Now I can see it on [founders’] faces, I can see when they’re scared. And they’re not going to say they’re scared but I know it’s tough. This is one of the toughest things that you’re going to go through. Now I can be there emotionally for these founders and I can say ‘here’s how you do it, here’s how you talk to your team and here’s what you share.’ A lot of founders feel like they have to do this alone and that’s why you have to get comfortable with your vulnerability.”

After Handle shuttered, Carolan returned to Menlo full time and made the firm a boatload of money from Roku’s IPO and now Uber’s. Anyway, thought those were some nice anecdotes that should be shared since most of our feeds are dominated by Silicon Valley hustle porn.

Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here. Ok, on to other news…

IPO corner

Uber dropped its S-1: We’ve got the basic deets, a rundown on key stakeholders, the company’s plan to help drivers buy stock, a look at all the money it’s has made from global divestitures and a glimpse at the company’s R&D spending for self-driving cars.
Pinterest is an “undercorn”: The visual search engine set its IPO range at $15 to $17 per share earlier this week. That translates to a midrange valuation of $10.64 billion, nearly $2 billion less than the company’s most recent private market valuation of $12.3 billion, hence “undercorn.”
PagerDuty pops: The SaaS business’s shares began trading on the NYSE on Thursday, popping more than 60 percent on their debut.
Jumia makes history: Jumia became the first startup from Africa to list on a major global exchange this week when it debuted its shares on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “JMIA.”
Lyft declines: The Uber competitor finished out the week trading at less than $60 per share, significantly below its initial share price of $74. Ouch.

Funds on funds on funds

There were so many fund announcements this week; here’s a quick list.

Extra Crunch

Lots of great new exclusive content for our Extra Crunch subscribers is on the site, including this deep dive into the challenges of transportation startup profits. Plus: When to ditch a nightmare customer, before they kill your startup; The right way to do AI in security; and The definitive Niantic reading guide.

Lawsuits

Sinema, that one MoviePass competitor, has run into its fair share of bumps in the road. TechCrunch’s Brian Heater hopped on the phone with the startup’s CEO this week to learn more about those bumps, why its terminating accounts en masse, a class-action lawsuit its battling and more.

Photo by Stephen McCarthy / RISE via Sportsfile

Startup capital

Battlefield!

TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield brings the world’s top early-stage startups together on one stage to compete for non-dilutive prize money, and the attention of media and investors worldwide. Here’s a quick update on some of our BF winners and finalists:

#Equitypod

If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Crunchbase News editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm, myself and Phil Libin, the founder of Evernote and AllTurtles, chat about the importance of IPOs. Plus, in a special Equity Shot, Alex and I unpack the Uber S-1.

Data tells us that investors love a good story

Published April 12, 2019

Russ Heddleston
Contributor

Russ is the cofounder and CEO of DocSend. He was previously a product manager at Facebook, where he arrived via the acquisition of his startup Pursuit.com, and has held roles at Dropbox, Greystripe, and Trulia. Follow him here: @rheddleston and @docsend

First impressions stick

The old adage “you only get one chance to make a first impression” is true when it comes to pitch decks, and in fact that was the case for our company’s own fundraising process. When I pitched DocSend for our seed round, I knew what we were up against — why will this be a big business? And, why won’t Google build this? Our product was still in private beta, and we had no revenue. However, we had an MVP and those who were using our product, including our potential investors, found the product to be very useful.

Pitching your product will kill your fundraising

Published April 12, 2019

Russ Heddleston
Contributor

Mistake 1: Don’t start with your product

It’s very tempting, especially for technical founders, to start pitch decks with how incredible their product is, how much time they’ve spent building it, their unique tech stack, and how convinced they are that they have just the right MVP for launch. But guess what?

All failed pitch decks start with the product. Investors spend 4x more time on product slides in failed pitch decks than they do in successful pitch decks.

You might think that’s a good thing. More time on my product slides, right? No. Data tells us that they are probably digging into the details trying to map your product‘s value to the current market needs and they are not coming away with a clear connection between the two.

Your target investors are also not your target customer. Showing screenshots and product details are just confusing for them. What are they looking at? Why does this matter? Most products are capable of being built; the question they are trying to answer is why is this product going to create a big business?

Image via DocSend

Mistake 2: Not starting with the “Why?”

By now Simon Sinek has beaten this one into our collective brains with his start with the why Ted Talk and yet what we see in our data is that in failed decks, the “why now” and “why you” question has been left to the end. Successful pitches start with their company purpose, followed by why this team, and why the timing is right for this particular product.

All successful pitch decks start with the company’s purpose, their raison d’être.

In successful decks, investors spend 27 seconds on an average on “why now” and “why you” slides but in failed decks, they spend 62 seconds on these slides. We read this as investors are spending more time researching your team and your capabilities than they do with successful pitch decks. More time spent on these pages means that investors are not as convinced about this venture as the entrepreneur would like them to be. Entrepreneurs should focus on making their “why” slides part of a seamless narrative that leaves the investors wondering why this isn’t already a huge business.

Image via DocSend

Mistake 3: Not telling a story

Everyone loves a good story and investors are no exception to this rule. All successful pitch decks tell a compelling story and follow a similar narrative thread. They start with the company purpose, the big problem they are trying to solve, why now is the right time, and why they are the right team to solve it. Failed pitch decks start with the product, followed by business model, and competitive landscape. Successful decks cover these too but they invariably follow a narrative that makes intuitive sense while in failed decks there is no compelling narrative.

In failed decks, investors spend more time on product, team, and financials, 6 minutes on average, vs. 2 minutes in successful decks.

Successful decks also get more repeat visits, they are visited 2.3 times more than failed decks and are forwarded along more often than failed pitch decks.

Image via DocSend

Your purpose is more important than your product

In the early days, entrepreneurs spend most of their time conceiving and building their minimum viable product (MVP). Naturally, they feel compelled to pitch this to investors. Although unintuitive, data suggests that you should restrain yourself from talking about your product before you have painted a narrative about the business opportunity: why now and why you. Once investors are convinced of those key points, by all means, go through all the product details and roadmaps. Just don’t lead with your product.

This is the first of a series of articles about fundraising. My followup article now available on Extra Crunch reveals what our data shows you should do with your deck. In future installments, I’ll be sharing more about the difference between Seed, Series A, and Series B rounds as well as how fundraising challenges change as your company grows. For the next post, I’ll be writing about why some pitch decks raise way more money than others. In the meantime, have questions about the best way to raise money? Check out our blog or reach out to us on Twitter at: @rheddleston or @docsend.

OpenStack Stein launches with improved Kubernetes support

Published April 12, 2019

The OpenStack project, which powers more than 75 public and thousands of private clouds, launched the 19th version of its software this week. You’d think that after 19 updates to the open-source infrastructure platform, there really isn’t all that much new the various project teams could add, given that we’re talking about a rather stable code base here. There are actually a few new features in this release, though, as well as all the usual tweaks and feature improvements you’d expect.

While the hype around OpenStack has died down, we’re still talking about a very active open-source project. On average, there were 155 commits per day during the Stein development cycle. As far as development activity goes, that keeps OpenStack on the same level as the Linux kernel and Chromium.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of that development activity focused on Kubernetes and the tools to manage these container clusters. With this release, the team behind the OpenStack Kubernetes installer brought the launch time for a cluster down from about 10 minutes to five, regardless of the number of nodes. To further enhance Kubernetes support, OpenStack Stein also includes updates to Neutron, the project’s networking service, which now makes it easier to create virtual networking ports in bulk as containers are spun up, and Ironic, the bare-metal provisioning service.

All of that is no surprise, given that according to the project’s latest survey, 61 percent of OpenStack deployments now use both Kubernetes and OpenStack in tandem.

The update also includes a number of new networking features that are mostly targeted at the many telecom users. Indeed, over the course of the last few years, telcos have emerged as some of the most active OpenStack users as these companies are looking to modernize their infrastructure as part of their 5G rollouts.

Besides the expected updates, though, there are also a few new and improved projects here that are worth noting.

“The trend from the last couple of releases has been on scale and stability, which is really focused on operations,” OpenStack Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce told me. “The new projects — and really most of the new projects from the last year — have all been pretty oriented around real-world use cases.”

The first of these is Placement. “As people build a cloud and start to grow it and it becomes more broadly adopted within the organization, a lot of times, there are other requirements that come into play,” Bryce explained. “One of these things that was pretty simplistic at the beginning was how a request for a resource was actually placed on the underlying infrastructure in the data center.” But as users get more sophisticated, they often want to run specific workloads on machines with certain hardware requirements. These days, that’s often a specific GPU for a machine learning workload, for example. With Placement, that’s a bit easier now.

It’s worth noting that OpenStack had some of this functionality before. The team, however, decided to uncouple it from the existing compute service and turn it into a more generic service that could then also be used more easily beyond the compute stack, turning it more into a kind of resource inventory and tracking tool.

Then, there is also Blazer, a reservation service that offers OpenStack users something akin to AWS Reserved Instances. In a private cloud, the use case for a feature is a bit different, though. But as some of the private clouds got bigger, some users found that they needed to be able to guarantee resources to run some of their regular, overnight batch jobs or data analytics workloads, for example.

As far as resource management goes, it’s also worth highlighting Sahara, which now makes it easier to provision Hadoop clusters on OpenStack.

In previous releases, one of the focus areas for the project was to improve the update experience. OpenStack is obviously a very complex system, so bringing it up to the latest version is also a bit of a complex undertaking. These improvements are now paying off. “Nobody even knows we are running Stein right now,” Vexxhost CEO Mohammed Nasar, who made an early bet on OpenStack for his service, told me. “And I think that’s a good thing. You want to be least impactful, especially when you’re in such a core infrastructure level. […] That’s something the projects are starting to become more and more aware of but it’s also part of the OpenStack software in general becoming much more stable.”

As usual, this release launched only a few weeks before the OpenStack Foundation hosts its bi-annual Summit in Denver. Since the OpenStack Foundation has expanded its scope beyond the OpenStack project, though, this event also focuses on a broader range of topics around open-source infrastructure. It’ll be interesting to see how this will change the dynamics at the event.

Harry Potter, the Platform, and the Future of Niantic

Published April 12, 2019

What is Niantic? If they recognize the name, most people would rightly tell you it’s a company that makes mobile games, like Pokémon GO, or Ingress, or Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

But no one at Niantic really seems to box it up as a mobile gaming company. Making these games is a big part of what the company does, yes, but the games are part of a bigger picture: they are a springboard, a place to figure out the constraints of what they can do with augmented reality today, and to figure out how to build the tech that moves it forward. Niantic wants to wrap their learnings back into a platform upon which others can build their own AR products, be it games or something else. And they want to be ready for whatever comes after smartphones.

Niantic is a bet on augmented reality becoming more and more a part of our lives; when that happens, they want to be the company that powers it.

This is Part 3 of our EC-1 series on Niantic, looking at its past, present, and potential future. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. The reading time for this article is 24 minutes (6,050 words)

The platform play

After the absurd launch of Pokémon GO, everyone wanted a piece of the AR pie. Niantic got more pitches than they could take on, I’m told, as rights holders big and small reached out to see if the company might build something with their IP or franchise.

But Niantic couldn’t build it all. From art, to audio, to even just thinking up new gameplay mechanics, each game or project they took on would require a mountain of resources. What if they focused on letting these other companies build these sorts of things themselves?

That’s the idea behind Niantic’s Real World Platform. This platform is a key part of Niantic’s game plan moving forward, with the company having as many people working on the platform as it has on its marquee money maker, Pokémon GO.

There are tons of pieces that go into making things like GO or Ingress, and Niantic has spent the better part of the last decade figuring out how to make them all fit together. They’ve built the core engine that powers the games and, after a bumpy start with Pokémon GO’s launch, figured out how to scale it to hundreds of millions of users around the world. They’ve put considerable work into figuring out how to detect cheaters and spoofers and give them the boot. They’ve built a social layer, with systems like friendships and trade. They’ve already amassed that real-world location data that proved so challenging back when it was building Field Trip, with all of those real-world points of interest that now serve as portals and Pokéstops.

Niantic could help other companies with real-world events, too. That might seem funny after the mess that was the first Pokémon GO Fest (as detailed in Part II). But Niantic turned around, went back to the same city the next year, and pulled it off. That experience — that battle-testing — is valuable. Meanwhile, the company has pulled off countless huge Ingress events, and a number of Pokémon GO side events called “Safari Zones.” CTO Phil Keslin confirmed to me that event management is planned as part of the platform offering.

As Niantic builds new tech — like, say, more advanced AR or faster ways to sync AR experiences between devices — it’ll all get rolled into the platform. With each problem they solve, the platform offering would grow.

But first they need to prove that there’s a platform to stand on.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite

Niantic’s platform, as it exists today, is the result of years of building their own games. It’s the collection of tools they’ve built and rebuilt along the way, and that already powers Ingress Prime and Pokémon GO. But to prove itself as a platform company, Niantic needs to show that they can do it again. That they can take these engines, these tools, and, working with another team, use them for something new.

Trump, FCC unveil plan to accelerate 5G rollout

Published April 12, 2019

In a press conference today in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, the president laid out a number of initiatives focused on helping accelerate the U.S. role in the 5G race.

“This is, to me, the future,” Trump said, opening the press conference flanked by Ajit Pai, Ivanka Trump and a room full of communications representatives in cowboy and hard hats.

“It’s all about 5G now,” Trump told the audience. “We were 4G and everyone was saying we had to get 4G, and then they said before that, ‘we have to get 3G,’ and now we have to get 5G. And 5G’s a big deal and that’s going to be there for a while. And at some point we’ll be talking about number six.”

The apparently off-script moment echoed Trump’s recent call on Twitter for the U.S. to get 6G technology “as soon as possible.” There’s something to be said for the spirit, perhaps, but it’s probably a little soon to be jumping the gun on a technology that doesn’t really exist just yet.

Trump used the opportunity to downplay earlier rumors that the government might be building its own 5G network, instead promoting a free-market method, while taking a shot at the government’s capabilities. “In the United States, our approach is private sector-driven and private sector-led,” he added. “The government doesn’t have to spend lots of money.”

In recent months, however, both the administration and the FCC have been discussing ways to make America more competitive in the race to the soon-to-be-ubiquitous cellular technology. Earlier today, the FCC announced plans to hold the largest spectrum auction in U.S. history, offering up the bands to wireless carriers. The planned auction is set to kick off on December 10.

“To accelerate and incentivize these investments, my administration is freeing up as much wireless spectrum as needed,” Trump added, echoing Pai’s plans.

Earlier today Pai and the FCC also proposed a $20.4 billion fund design to help connect rural areas. The chairman said the commission believes the fund could connect as many as four million small businesses and residences over the course of the next decade.

The focus is understandable, of course. 5G’s value will go far beyond faster smartphones, providing connections for a wide range of IoT and smart technologies and potentially helping power things like robotics and autonomous vehicles. The technology will undeniably be a key economic driver, touching as of yet unseen portions of the U.S. workforce.

HQ Trivia replaces Quiz Daddy Scott Rogowsky

Published April 12, 2019

Quiz Khalifa aka Host Malone aka Trap Trebek aka HQ Trivia’s Scott Rogowsky has been pushed out of the live mobile gaming startup. The two split due to disagreements about Rogowsky attempting to take a second full-time job hosting sports streaming service DAZN’s baseball show ChangeUp while moving to only hosting HQ on weekends, TMZ first reported. HQ wanted someone committed to their show.

Now HQ co-founder and CEO Rus Yusupov confirms to TechCrunch that Rogowsky will no longer host HQ Trivia. He tells me that the company ran a SurveyMonkey survey of its top players and they voted that former guest host Matt Richards rated higher than Rogowsky. Yusupov says HQ is excited to have Richards as its new prime time host. It’s also putting out offers to more celebrity guests to host for a few shows, a few weeks or even a whole season of one of its time slots.

HQ Trivia’s new host Matt Richards

The departure could still shake HQ’s brand since Rogowsky had become the de facto face of the company. But he was also prone to talking a lot on the air and promoting himself, sometimes in ways that felt distracting from the game. Rogowsky has also been using HQ’s brand to further his stand-up comedy career, splashing its logo on advertising for his shows like this one below at a casino where “The centerpiece is a live trivia competition,” he told WPTV5.

[Update: Rogowsky has since commented on his departure via tweetstorm. He thanked the team and viewers for their support but didn’t mention the startup’s founders, confirmed his ChangeUp gig led to leaving HQ, and threw a dig at the company noting “I wasn’t given the courtesy of a farewell show.”]

Sadly, it won’t be possible for me to continue hosting HQ concurrently as I had hoped, and because I wasn’t given the courtesy of a farewell show, please allow me to use this thread to say all the things I would have said on my final broadcast. (2/5)

— Scott Rogowsky (@ScottRogowsky) April 12, 2019

Rogowsky also issued TechCrunch this statement:

“Nothing in my decade-plus entertainment career has meant more to me personally and professionally than my involvement with HQ. I am tremendously grateful to the talented team of engineers, writers, animators and producers at Intermedia Labs who helped me grow the show into the international phenomenon it became, and above all, I will forever be thankful for the millions of HQties around the world who will always hold a special place in my heart. While the decision to leave HQ was a difficult one, I am delighted to begin this next chapter in my career with the amazing people at MLB and DAZN. If you miss me on HQ, you can now get three hours of me every weeknight watching ChangeUp on DAZN.”

TechCrunch had predicted that Rogowsky might depart if he wasn’t properly compensated with equity in HQ Trivia that would only vest and earn him money if he stuck around. The damage to HQ could worsen if he’s scooped up by Facebook, Snapchat or another tech company to build out their own live video gaming shows.

Rogowsky used HQ Trivia branding to promote his own in-person comedy and trivia shows

HQ Trivia provided this statement on Rogowsky’s exit:

We continue to build an incredible company at HQ Trivia, from drawing hundreds of thousands of players to the platform daily, to increasing the size of the prize, to attracting strong talent. We’ve come a long way since Scott Rogowsky’s first trivia game and we’re grateful for everything he’s done for the platform. This is a team that creates products for talent to really shine—we’re just getting started at HQ Trivia, and as he makes his next move, wanted to take a minute to thank him for being part of our journey.

Yusupov tells me he’s excited about exploring new hosts, noting that Richards is a person of color who brings more diversity to HQ’s lineup. Richards is a stand-up comic who has appeared on CBS’ 2 Broke Girls, Nickelodeon’s School of Rock and was a voice-over host for game show Trivial Takedown on FUSE. Yusupov says the team feels jazzed about the new creative opportunities beyond Rogowsky, though the CEO says he appreciates all that its former host contributed.

Richards will have the tall task of trying to revive HQ’s popularity. It climbed the app store charts to become the No. 3 top game and No. 6 overall app in January 2018, and peaked at 2.38 million concurrent players in March 2018. But it’s been on a steady decline since, falling to the No. 585 overall app in August, and it dropped out of the top 1,500 last month, according to App Annie. HQ Trivia was installed more than 160,000 times last month on iOS and Android, with approximately $200,000 in in-app purchase revenue, according to Sensor Tower. But that’s just 8 percent as many downloads as the 1.97 million new installs HQ got in March 2018.

Exhaustion with the game format, so many winners splitting jackpots to just a few dollars per victor and laggy streams have all driven away players. The introduction of a new Wheel of Fortune-style HQ Words game in August hasn’t stopped the decline. And the tragic death of HQ co-founder and former CEO Colin Kroll may have impeded efforts to turn things around. There’s a ton of pressure on the company after it raised $23 million, including a $15 million round at a $100 million valuation.

Even if HQ Trivia fades from the zeitgeist, it and Rogowsky will have inspired a new wave of innovation in what it means to play with our phones.

Homeland Security warns of security flaws in enterprise VPN apps

Published April 12, 2019

Several enterprise virtual private networking apps are vulnerable to a security bug that can allow an attacker to remotely break into a company’s internal network, according to a warning issued by Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division.

An alert was published Friday by the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency following a public disclosure by CERT/CC, the vulnerability disclosure center at Carnegie Mellon University.

The VPN apps built by four vendors — Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Pulse Secure and F5 Networks — improperly store authentication tokens and session cookies on a user’s computer. These aren’t your traditional consumer VPN apps used to protect your privacy, but enterprise VPN apps that are typically rolled out by a company’s IT staff to allow remote workers to access resources on a company’s network.

The apps generate tokens from a user’s password and are stored on their computer to keep the user logged in without having to reenter their password every time. But if stolen, these tokens can allow access to that user’s account without needing their password.

But with access to a user’s computer — such as through malware — an attacker could steal those tokens and use them to gain access to a company’s network with the same level of access as the user. That includes company apps, systems and data.

So far, only Palo Alto Networks has confirmed its GlobalProtect app was vulnerable. The company issued a patch for both its Windows and Mac clients.

Neither Cisco nor Pulse Secure have patched their apps. F5 Networks is said to have known about storing since at least 2013 but advised users to roll out two-factor authentication instead of releasing a patch.

CERT warned that hundreds of other apps could be affected — but more testing was required.

Cybersecurity 101: Seven simple security guides for protecting your privacy