Ideaforge

On a Wednesday at 4 p.m. in June 2017, I was in a small, packed office in midtown Manhattan.

The overcrowded conference room, with at least five more people than any fire marshal would recommend, was stacked comically high with paperwork and an eclectic collection of cheap pens. As I neared the end of the third hour and the ink of my seventh pen, I realized the mortgage closing process may be somewhat antiquated.

After closing on my first home, it was inconceivable to me that every other expense in my life has gone digital, but the most significant purchase I’ve ever made required hundreds of signatures and several handwritten checks delivered in person. By comparison, I have been able to repay my student loans, comparable in magnitude to a down payment, exclusively through online portals.

How COVID-19 is accelerating digital advancements

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed nearly every facet of our lives. One potential silver lining for the real estate world may be a forced reckoning with the mortgage closing process. Technological advances like e-closings are accelerating this arduous process into the digital age. The U.S. Census Bureau released figures in July citing the rise in homeownership across the country as the pandemic fuels the demand for single-family properties outside of urban areas. This is confirmed by the significant spike in mortgage applications seen in the second quarter of 2020.

The first signs of digitization of the mortgage origination process were seen in mid-2010 when lenders began adopting digital disclosures. Despite the availability of technology, the market has been slower to fully embrace digital closings that enable the full loan package to be electronically reviewed, recorded, signed and notarized. A true e-closing includes a digital promissory note (“eNote”), a virtual closing appointment and the electronic transfer and recording of documents by the county, all of which can be remotely coordinated and executed by the parties involved. The market started to pick up pace in recent years, and we’ve seen the number of e-mortgages increase by more than 450% from 2018 to 2019.

Source: Tech Crunch

SlideShare has a new owner, with LinkedIn selling the presentation-sharing service to Scribd for an undisclosed price.

According to LinkedIn, Scribd will take over operation of the SlideShare business on September 24.

Scribd CEO Trip Adler argued that the two companies have very similar roots, both launching in 2006/2007 with stories on TechCrunch, and both of them focused on content- and document-sharing.

“The two products always had kind of similar missions,” Adler said. “The difference was, [SlideShare] focused on more on PowerPoint presentations and business users, while we focused more on PDFs and Word docs and long-form written content, more on the general consumer.”

Over time, the companies diverged even further, with SlideShare acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, and LinkedIn itself acquired by Microsoft in 2016.

Scribd, meanwhile, launched a Netflix-style subscription service for e-books and audiobooks, but Adler said that both the “user-generated side” and the “premium side” remain important to the business.

“We get people who come in looking for documents, then sign up for our premium content,” he said. “But they do continue to read documents, too.”

So when Microsoft and LinkedIn approached Scribd about acquiring SlideShare, Adler saw an opportunity to expand the document side of the product dramatically, incorporating SlideShare’s content library of 40 million presentations and its audience of 100 million monthly unique visitors.

The deal, Adler said, is fundamentally about tapping into SlideShare’s “content and audience,” though he said there may be aspects of the service’s technology that Scribd could incorporate as well. Scribd isn’t taking on any new employees as part of the deal; instead, its existing team is taking responsibility for SlideShare’s operation.

He added that SlideShare will continue to operate as a standalone service, separate from Scribd, and that he’s hopeful it will continue to be well-integrated with LinkedIn.

“Nothing will change in the initial months,” Adler said. “We have a lot of experience with a product like this, both the technology stack and with users uploading content. We’re in a good position make SlideShare really successful.”

Meanwhile, a statement from LinkedIn Vice President of Engineering Chris Pruett highlighted the work that the company has done on SlideShare since the acquisition:

LinkedIn acquired SlideShare in May 2012 at a time when it was becoming clear that professionals were using LinkedIn for more than making professional connections. Over the last eight years, the SlideShare team, product, and community has helped shape the content experience on LinkedIn. We’ve incorporated the ability to upload, share, and discuss documents on LinkedIn.

Source: Tech Crunch

5G is increasingly coming into focus as a set of technologies that has the potential to dramatically expand the quality, bandwidth, and range of wireless connectivity. One of the major blocks to actually rolling out these technologies though is simply spectrum: there just isn’t enough of it available for private use. 5G needs spectrum at very low frequencies to penetrate buildings and increase range, and it also needs high frequencies to support the huge bandwidth that future applications will require.

The crux though is in the midband — frequencies that can support a mix of range, latency and bandwidth that could become a mainstay of 5G technologies, particularly as a bridge for legacy infrastructure and devices.

Today, the midband of U.S. spectrum is heavily utilized by government services like the military, which uses the spectrum for everything from conflict operations to satellite connectivity. That has prevented commercial operators from accessing that spectrum and moving forward with wider 5G deployments.

That’s why it is notable today that the White House announced that the 3450Mhz to 3550 Mhz spectrum will officially be handed off to the FCC for an auction that will allow private operators to access midband spectrum. Given the legal process involved, that auction is expected to take place in December 2021, with private operation of services likely beginning in 2022. Usage of the band is expected to follow the spectrum sharing rules of AWS-3, according to a senior Trump administration official.

According to the White House, a committee of 180 experts was assembled from all the armed services and the Defense Secretary’s office to look at where a segment of the DoD’s spectrum could be freed up and moved to private usage to back 5G.

Such efforts are in line with the MOBILE NOW Act of 2017, which Congress passed in order to spur government agencies to speed up the process of allocating spectrum for 5G uses. That act encouraged NTIA, an agency which advises on telecom issues for the U.S. government, to identify the 3450Mhz to 3550Mhz band as a major area of study back in 2018, and earlier this year in January the agency found “viable options” for converting the band to private use.

It’s the latest positive step in the long transition of wireless to 5G services, which demands changes in technology (such as the wireless chips in cell phones), spectrum allocation, policy development, and infrastructure buildout in order to come to fruition.

Ted S. Rappaport, a professor of electrical engineering and the founding director of NYU WIRELESS, an academic research center focused on advanced wireless technologies, said that “It’s great news for America … and a terrific move for U.S. consumers and for the U.S. wireless industry.”

He noted that the particular frequency was valuable given existing knowledge and research in the industry. “It’s not that far from existing 4G spectrum where engineers and technicians already have good understanding of the propagation. And it’s also at a spectrum where the electronics are very low cost and very easy to make.”

There has been growing pressure on U.S. government leaders in recent years over the plodding 5G transition, which has fallen behind peer countries like China and South Korea. Korea in particular has been a world leader, with more than two million 5G subscribers already in the country thanks to an aggressive industrial policy by Seoul to invest in the country’s telecommunications infrastructure and take a lead in this new wireless transition.

The U.S. has been faster at moving ahead in millimeter (high frequency) spectrum for 5G that will have the greatest bandwidth, but it has lagged in midband spectrum allocation. While the announcements today is notable, there will also be concerns whether 100Mhz of spectrum is sufficient to support the widest variety of 5G devices, and thus, this allocation may well be just the first in a series.

Nonetheless, additional midband spectrum for 5G will help move the transition forward, and will also help device and chip manufacturers begin to focus their efforts on the specific bands they need to support in their products. While it may be a couple of more years until 5G devices are widely available (and useful) in the United States, spectrum has been a key gating factor to reaching the next-generation of wireless, and a gate that is finally opening up.

Source: Tech Crunch

Amazon has amassed at least 1 million subscribers for its Prime loyalty service in India, the e-commerce giant revealed today in a long rundown of how its platform fared during last week’s Prime Day in the world’s second largest internet market.

More than a million Prime subscribers in India shopped from small businesses in the two weeks leading up to 48-hour Prime Day event last week, the company said in a blog post. Factoring in the ongoing global pandemic, Amazon last month chose India as the first market for Prime Day this year.

This is the first time Amazon has even vaguely disclosed how many of its users in India have signed up for the Prime subscription that costs $13.3 a year in the country and bundles Prime Video and Prime Music services. Amazon launched Prime in India four years ago. Globally, Amazon has over 150 million Prime subscribers.

More than 91,000 small businesses (sellers) in India — a record for the company — participated in the local Prime Day, and sold to customers living in 5,900 zip codes (covering more than 97% of the country). Over 4,000 of these businesses clocked sales of more than $13,350 (slightly below 4,500 businesses during last year’s Prime Day), and overall 31,000 sellers reported the two-day period last week as their best selling on the platform.

Chinese firms Xiaomi and OnePlus continued to command dominance in the smartphone category, one of the top three selling categories on Amazon, during Prime Day and also attracted customers to their accessories, laptops, and television sets, Amazon disclosed. The reception stands in contrast with the all-time high anti-China sentiments swirling across India in recent months.

Amit Agarwal, SVP and Country Manager of Amazon India, said in a televised interview that last week’s Prime Day also illustrated an “increasing trend of local Indian sellers use Amazon as a starting point to launch products and reach customers globally” but he declined to share any figures.

“This Prime Day was dedicated to our small business (SMB) partners, who have been increasingly looking to Amazon to keep their businesses running. We are humbled that we were able to help as this was our biggest Prime Day ever for small businesses,” he said in a statement.

Prime Day is one of the biggest sales events for Amazon globally. In India, the e-commerce giant has historically sold more goods during sales events scheduled around the festival of Diwali, which is when local residents peak their spendings.

But the participation of 91,000 sellers in last week’s Prime Day is the highest Amazon has ever witnessed during any sales period in India. During the sale around Diwali last year, for instance, the company had reported the participation of 65,000 sellers.

Amazon, which competes with Walmart’s Flipkart in India, has visibly rushed to expand its base of sellers in the country in recent quarters. Earlier this year, Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said the company would invest $1 billion in India to help digitize local small businesses and increase their cumulative exports on Amazon to $10 billion by 2025.

The company revealed today that it has amassed 650,000 sellers in India, up from 500,000 it disclosed in January this year.

Amazon has also been focusing on tie-ups with neighborhood stores across the country, leveraging their vast reach to drive more people to shop online. The company said over a thousand such shops from more than 100 cities made their debut on Prime Day last week.

Amazon also claimed that during Prime Day, the number of requests people made to Alexa exceeded one million. The company also shared a wide-range of other stats such as a claim that twice as many customers signed up for a Prime membership during last week’s Prime Day compared to last year’s. But without any concrete figures, these numbers are bereft of meaning.

Source: Tech Crunch

Apple’s still-in-beta operating systems will automatically redirect News+ subscribers to the Apple News app when they click on links from a News+ publisher.

In other words, if you click or tap on a link to a paywalled story published by a News+ partner — including stories from our own Extra Crunch membership program — iOS 14, iPadOS 14 and macOS Big Sur will take you straight to the article page in the News+ app, even when the link ostensibly points to the publisher’s own website.

Tony Haile (who founded the ad-free subscription news service Scroll)  tweeted about the change this morning, and I’ve been able to replicate it myself.

The experience should be familiar to (for example) New York Times app readers who, when they click on a web link, are taken straight to the article page in the NY Times app. (In TechCrunch’s case, I noticed that Apple even prompts users to open the News app when they click on stories that aren’t paywalled.)

This addresses one of the more frustrating elements of being a News+ subscriber: Although your $9.99 monthly subscription gets you access to paywalled stories from publishers like The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, you only get access via the News app — not the publishers’ websites. So I’ve often seen something I want to read on Google or Twitter, but instead of clicking the link, I have to open the News app and track down the story.

So this seems like it should significantly improve the reader experience, even if it might be a little disconcerting at first. And it only applies to News+ subscribers, who are opted-in but will have the option to turn off the “Open Web Links in News” feature in their News settings.

But as Haile noted, publishers may be less excited about the change: “Any strategic rationale that Apple News+ represents a separate  channel/audience is now gone. This directly cannibalizes a publishers’ core subscription audience.”

Although Apple has not released News+ subscriber numbers, there have been several reports — including a November 2019 story from CNBC —suggesting that the service has struggled to attract new subscribers after signing on 200,000 users in the first 48 hours after launch. And Digiday reported that publishers have been underwhelmed with revenue.

Source: Tech Crunch

Angel funding, seed investing and generally focusing on earlier stage investing is a huge business in the world of startups these days — it helps investors get in early to the most promising companies, and (because of the smaller size of the checks) allows for even the less prolific to spread their bets.

There was a time when it was immensely difficult for a founder to get a first check, not least because there were fewer people writing them. However, Jeff Clavier was an exception to that rule.

As the founder of Uncork Capital (formerly known as SoftTech VC), he has been in the business of angel and seed investing for 16 years, popularizing the opportunity and highlighting the need for more support at this stage — well before it was cool. You could say he was early to early stage.

Clavier said that at the end of 2019, it was estimated that there were more than 1,000 firms focusing on seed investing in the market, but by the end of this year, there will be about 2,000. “Don’t ask me whether it makes any sense because when I started 16 years ago, I didn’t think would be a big deal,” he said. “But certainly that creates a bit of a conundrum for founders to try and understand.”

As of now, Clavier has made nearly 230 investments and counting.

TechCrunch Early Stage, our virtual conference highlighting that stage of startup life, was the perfect venue to hear from him on all things seed investing and building startups today. Below are some highlights, a link to the video and a pitch deck he put together for the chat. Questions were edited for space and clarity.

Not all VCs are created equal (so know who you are pitching)

First thing to understand is that not all VCs are created equal. There are a bunch of different firms, tons of them out there, and you as a founder need to understand what are the specifics of your pitch opportunity, how to match with the right firm, and to figure out what stage of “early” you happen to be.

Startups can be super early, or mid-stage, which is typically what we refer to as pre-seed. Then there’s the seed stage, where you have developed a product, with a demo. And there is post-seed, where you have product but are not quite ready to raise a Series A. So who are the firms that can actually be the right fit for me at those different stages? The qualification part of the targeting is really important. Especially in a COVID environment when you can’t spend the same kind of time with each other.

It’s useful for founders to try and understand investors better, maybe asking a couple of questions like, “When is the last time you made a brand new investment at seed stage?” And “How has your investment process changed as a result of COVID?”

For investors, you want to understand how you’re going to evolve your process to cope with the fact that you don’t spend time with those founders face-to-face. Some firms are still struggling with that.

At Uncork, we’re now past the point of portfolio triage that we had in the first few weeks of of the pandemic. What was surprising to me was the speed and velocity at which some deals actually.

Find an investment lead

Source: Tech Crunch

Timothy Bouré and his co-founder Geoffrey Lucks were both near broke when they moved to Dallas to join the first accelerator they entered after forming VenoStent, a company that aims to improve outcomes for dialysis patients.

Failed dialysis surgeries occur in roughly 55% to 65% of patients with end-stage renal disease, according to the company. Caring for these patients can cost the Medicare and Medicaid Services system roughly $2 billion per year — and Bouré and Lucks believed that they’d come up with a solution.

So after years developing the technology at the core of VenoStent’s business at Vanderbilt University, the two men relocated from Nashville to South Texas to make their business work.

Bouré had first started working on the technology at the heart of VenoStent’s offering as part of his dissertation in 2012. Lucks, a graduate student at the business school was introduced to the material scientist and became convinced that VenoStent was on the verge of having a huge impact for the medical community. Five years later, the two were in Dallas where they met the chief of vascular surgery at Houston Medicine and were off to the races.

A small seed round in 2018 kept the company going and a successful animal trial near the end of the year gave it the momentum it needed to push forward. Now, as it graduates from the latest Y Combinator cohort, the company is finally ready for prime time.

In the interim, a series of grants and its award of a Kidney XPrize kept the company in business.

The success was hard won, as Bouré spent nearly three sleepless nights in the J-Labs, Johnson and Johnson’s  medical technology and innovation accelerator in Houston, synthesizing polymers and printing the sleeve stents that the company makes to keep replace the risky and failure-prone surgeries for end stage kidney disease patients.

The key discovery that Bouré made was around a new type of polymer that can be used to support cell growth as it heals from the dialysis surgery.

In 2012, Bouré stumbled upon the polymer that would be the foundation for the work. Then, in 2014, he did the National Science Foundation Core program and started thinking about the wrap for blood vessels. Through a series of discussions with vascular surgeons he realized that the problem was especially acute for end stage renal disease patients.

Already the company has raised $2.4 million in grant funding and small equity infusions. and the KidneyX Prize from the Department of Health and Human Services and the American Society of Nephrology. VenoStent was one of six winners.

“It’s part of this whole ongoing effort by the executive office to improve dialysis,” said Bouré. “[They are] some of the most expensive patients to treat in the world… Basically the government is highly incentivized to find technologies that improve patient’s lives.”

Now the company is heading into its next round of animal testing and will seek to conduct its first human trials outside of the United States in 2021.

And while the company is focused on renal failure first, the materials that Bouré has developed have applications for other conditions as well. “This can be a material for the large intestine,” says Bouré. “It has tunability in terms of all its properties. And we can modify it for a particular application.”

Source: Tech Crunch

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that TikTok and Twitter have held talks about a potential merger, even as the video sharing company defends itself against President Donald Trump’s pressure to force the sale of the business or potentially ban it.

As the internationally distributed video streaming version of Chinese technology developer Bytedance’s social media app, TikTok has amassed a global user of avid consumers for its short form videos, including at least 100 million users in the US.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter and Bytedance have had preliminary talks about a merger of TikTok’s US operations with the publicly traded social media company. The Journal noted that Microsoft remains the front-runner for TikTok’s business in the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and that a potential tie-up with Twitter would just be for TikTok’s North American business.

Any Twitter bid for Bytedance’s TikTok business would likely have to bolstered by additional investors, since TikTok is valued anywhere between $15 billion and $50 billion dollars — far too big a bite for Twitter, which has a market capitalization of $29 billion.

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order that would force the sale of TikTok’s US operations or face being banned. So Bytedance has to find a buyer before Sept. 15, or shut the business down in the US.

So far, Twitter and Microsoft are the only reported bidders for Bytedance’s business, but others could emerge. And there’s the potential that any sale could be scuttled by lawsuits challenging the President’s executive order.

On Saturday, National Public Radio reported that TikTok is planning to do just that. The company will reportedly argue that the executive order from the President didn’t follow due process, and that its underlying argument that TikTok poses a national security threat is baseless, according to NPR.

Some prominent figures in the technology industry, like Bill Gates, are also questioning the process by which Bytedance is being forced to sell its business.

“[Having] Trump kill off the only competitor, it’s pretty bizarre,” Gates said in an interview with Wired. “[The] principle that this is proceeding on is singly strange. The cut thing, that’s doubly strange.”

If Twitter, were, by some miracle, to acquire TikTok’s US operations, it would add a huge additional pillar to the company’s business and permanently reshape the social media landscape. It would add a massive new user base and change the demographics of the company’s user base.

The irony of such a deal shouldn’t be lost on longtime tech watchers, who will remember that Twitter had the opportunity to become TikTok if it hadn’t killed the short form video streaming service, Vine.

Source: Tech Crunch