Vertical market networks, effective startup names, Libra, Carbon, and Sidewalk Labs

The next service marketplace wave: Vertical market networks

B2B service marketplaces (think translation as a service) are an extraordinarily lucrative startup category. But despite the incredible potential of these platforms to generate outsized returns, many fail. Why?

Ivan Smolnikov, the CEO and founder of translation service startup Smartcat, investigates why certain marketplaces seem to grow while others stall. His conclusion is that unlocking value for both sides of the marketplace is much more challenging than it appears, and the most successful, next-generation marketplaces are going to come from highly networked, efficient platforms for complex projects targeting specific verticals.

Smolnikov then gives a step-by-step guide to optimizing marketplace growth.

One reason is that several service providers must often work together to complete a single job for a buyer, requiring a complex workflow from end to end. As a result, it’s difficult for marketplaces to not only mediate service delivery but also make it significantly more efficient for buyers and suppliers. If both the buyer and suppliers don’t see a significant efficiency gain other than being initially matched, why would they continue using the marketplace?

What startup names are most effective?

Perhaps the first step in building a company is just figuring out what to call it. Adam Zelcer, who founded Adboy, explores some tactics on how to optimize a startup’s name.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2YfcG9h

TransferWise’s new debit card for the US fires the starting gun on a new war for travelers

International money transfer service TransferWise, has made a significant incursion into the US market today, launching a MasterCard debit card alongside a multicurrency account. Mirroring the card it has already launched in the UK and Europe last year, the card will work in over 40 currencies without balance limits, and conversion fees will be competitive with current exchange rates. A similar card aimed at businesses will follow the consumer launch.

Co-founder Taavet Hinrikus told me that the card effectively makes the average person able to act like a millionaire when they are traveling. “Alternative ‘travel’ cards are four times more expensive for every dollar spent and are only available to the top 10% of people who pass credit checks and also pay hundreds of dollars per year,” he said.

He believes this card will democratize the whole market. That means it’s likely that US tourists in Europe or elsewhere will be hugely attracted to this card because they will be charged as if they were a local person, in the local currencies, without all the normal fees.

Transferwise is also pushing an immigration angle to the launch featuring Tan France (pictured), star of “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy”.

Key features of the account and debit card include international bank details for the UK, the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, meaning account and routing numbers that are unique to the account holder. Additionally, if a holder swipes a card in a currency they don’t have in their account, the card knows to choose the cheapest option from their available balances. The card is also free to get, with now no subscription, no sign-up fees, and no monthly maintenance fee. Holders can also freeze/unfreeze the card from the Transferwise app and receive push notifications every time they spend. It will also sync with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.

Hinrikus added: “Our goal is to offer bank details for every country in the world through one account — the world’s first global account — and we’re starting with five of the world’s top currencies. The 40-currency debit card completes the package, so we’re excited to be releasing the card in the US.

Earlier this year TransferWise said it was now valued at $3.5 billion after closing a $292 million secondary funding round. In November it reported an annual post-tax net profit of $8 million for the year ending March 2018. At the time it said it had five million users transacting $5 billion across its platform a month.

While Transferwise competes with the smaller Revolut and WorldRemit, as well as incumbents like Western Union and MoneyGram, with the launch of this new card it will also be breathing down the neck of Paypal.

Its investors include Old Mutual, Institutional Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Lead Edge Capital, Lone Pine Capital, Vitruvian Partners, BlackRock, Valar Ventures, Baillie Gifford, PayPal founder Max Levchin, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, among others.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2XfQ38l

Shopify Ping adds support for Apple Business Chat and Apple Pay

Last year Shopify announced Shopify Ping, a free unified messaging platform for merchants to communicate directly with customers in a chat context. Today, it announced it’s adding support for Apple Business Chat to Shopify Ping.

The real benefit to this is that users can not only use Apple’s business chat product to communicate with customers, the customers can pay directly with Apple Pay right inside the chat client, reducing friction, and making it more likely the person will complete his or her purchase.

As the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new integration, this approach is likely to increase sales. “We know that customers who engage in a conversation with a brand are nearly three times as likely to complete a purchase. Live chat also creates a personal connection between a brand and the customer which builds trust and makes them more likely to come back,” the company wrote.

With Shopify Ping, merchants can manage all of the Apple Business Chat interactions together with its other chat traffic in a single place. This means that small merchants have access to the same rich set of customer interaction tools as some of the biggest merchants on the planet, enabling them to provide a more sophisticated level of service, something that has often been out of reach for smaller businesses without deep pockets.

Apple Business Chat was released last year to provide businesses with a way to use iMessage in a business context. The company has been expanding the product over the last year, and today’s announcement puts it in reach of Shopify’s vast user base.

Shopify announces free customer communication and targeting tool

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Lqh8OZ

Tesla reportedly working on its own battery cell manufacturing capability

Automaker Tesla is looking into how it might own another key part of its supply chain, through research being done at a secret lab near its Fremont, CA HQ, CNBC reports. The company currently relies on Panasonic to build the battery pack and cells it uses for its vehicles, which is one of, if not the most significant component in terms of its overall bill of materials.

Tesla is no stranger to owning components of its own supply chain rather than farming them out to vendors as is more common among automakers – it builds its own seats at a facility down the road from its Fremont car factory, for instance, and it recently started building its own chip for its autonomous features, taking over those duties from Nvidia.

Eliminating links in the chain where possible is a move emulated from Tesla CEO Elon Musk inspiration Apple, which under Steve Jobs adopted an aggressive strategy of taking control of key parts of its own supply mix and continues to do so where it can eke out improvements to component cost. Musk has repeatedly pointed out that batteries are a primary constraint when it comes to Tesla’s ability to produce not only is cars, but also its home power products like the Powerwall consumer domestic battery for solar energy systems.

Per the CNBC report, Tesla is doing its battery research at an experimental lab near its factory in Fremont, at a property it maintains on Kato road. Tesla would need lots more time and effort to turn its battery ambitions into production at the scale it requires, however, so don’t expect it to replace Panasonic anytime soon. And in fact, it could add LG as a supplier in addition to Panasonic once its Shanghai factory starts producing Model 3s, per the report.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Xa48nn

Apple News launches a guide to the 2020 Democratic candidates and debates

Apple today is introducing a new section in its Apple News application for iOS, iPad and Mac that’s designed to familiarize voters with the 20 U.S. Democratic presidential candidates ahead of the first Democratic debates hosted on June 26 and June 27 by NBC News, MSNBC, and Telemundo in Miami, Florida. The new guide is meant to provide a single place where readers can learn about a candidate’s biography, experience, and current position on key issues, among other things.

It will also feature photos and videos, along with recent coverage from trusted news sources.

Apple says that it will leverage a diverse set of news sources to provide this information, including ABC News, Axios, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, Politico, The Hill, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TIME, USA Today, Vox and others.

The candidate information is curated and organized by Apple’s team of News editors, and will be found in the Top Stories section of its Apple News app.

As the debates begin, the section will expand from being only a guide to candidates to being a hub for updates from the debates, too. It will then include articles and video highlights from NBC News, as well as fact-checking, reactions, and key onstage moments and takeaways, says Apple in an announcement about the new feature.

The hub will continue to be updated after the debates, as well, with more news throughout the campaign.

In addition, users can personalize their experience by tracking their favorite candidates in Apple News. To do so, they’ll just click the “follow” button for the candidate in the app, then will receive any breaking news around that candidate as well as see ongoing news coverage about the candidate appear in their Apple News Today feed and elsewhere within the News app.

This isn’t the first time Apple has involved itself in helping curate and organize election-related information. Most recently, it launched a real-time news hub for the 2018 Midterms.

Similar to its earlier efforts, the new hub isn’t just text and media. It also includes helpful infographics to better understand key points — like how much money a candidate has raised and how that compares others, for example.

The hub also presents the necessary info in a very readable style, with sections like “You know him/her for:,” “Breakout moment:,” “You’ll love him/here if you…,” “You’ll leave him/her if you…”, and “You probably didn’t know that…”

Apple has taken the opposite approach from Facebook when it comes to providing easy access to news and information to its users. Facebook fired its news editors then turned its “trends” section over to an algorithm, before giving up and killing it altogether. But Apple has instead hired an editorial team of former journalists to organize and curate the news that tens of millions of people read. The News team doesn’t write its own stories, but plays a large role in selecting the stories that people first see when they open the app.

The result is an easy-to-use app designed with Apple’s aesthetic, where journalism gets top billing — not clickbait, viral news, and intentional sources of disinformation.

“The 2020 Democratic field is complex, and we want to offer Apple News readers a trusted place to learn more about candidates they’re familiar with and those they may be hearing about for the first time,” said Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News. “The candidate guide in Apple News is a robust and reliable resource, connecting readers to valuable at-a-glance information and to great journalism from our partners.”

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2J9gwKD

Huawei says two-thirds of 5G networks outside China now use its gear

Self-driving startup Drive.ai is closing down

Drive.ai, the autonomous vehicle tech startup once valued at $200 million, is shutting down after four years, according to a state regulatory filing.

The closure was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. The company is not responding to media inquiries, a PR rep told TechCrunch.

The company’s Mountain View headquarters will close down on Friday, according to WARN documents filed with the Employment Development Department of California. A company must file a WARN document ahead of a mass layoff or plant closure.

Rumors have been swirling for weeks that Apple was looking to snap up the startup. Earlier this month, The Information reported that Apple was pursuing an acqui-hire, a term that typically means a smaller, targeted acquisition aimed at bringing on specific talent.

That appears to have panned out for at least some of the company’s 90 employees. At least five employees changed their LinkedIn profiles to show they started employment at Apple’s special projects division this month, according to SF Chronicle and confirmed by TechCrunch’s own review.

Drive.air was founded in 2015 by former graduate students working in Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab run by Andrew Ng, the renowned artificial intelligence expert. Ng is chairman of Drive.ai’s board and is married to co-founder Carol Reiley.

The company, which originally focused on self-driving software systems and intelligent communications systems, received a lot of attention and investment in those first years. It later raised more money as it tweaked its business model with a plan to combine deep learning software with hardware to make self-driving retrofitted kits designed for business and commercial fleets. In all, the company has raised about $77 million, according to Pitchbook data. It was last valued at $200 million in 2017.

The startup ramped up operations in 2017 and 2018. Last year it launched a pilot program in Frisco, Texas to test an on-demand service using self-drivings. But even as it expanded, the executive team appeared to be constantly in flux with several people holding the CEO spot.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2KDZmbs