Ideaforge

Dell’s 2015 decision to buy EMC for $67 billion remains the largest pure tech deal in history, but a transaction of such magnitude created a mountain of debt for the Texas-based company and its primary backer, Silver Lake.

Dell would eventually take on close to $50 billion in debt. Years later, where are they in terms of paying that back, and has the deal paid for itself?

When EMC put itself up for sale, it was under pressure from activist investors Elliott Management to break up the company. In particular, Elliott reportedly wanted the company to sell one of its most valuable parts, VMware, which it believed would help boost EMC’s share price. (Elliott is currently turning the screws on Twitter and SoftBank.)

Whatever the reason, once the company went up for sale, Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake came ‘a callin with an offer EMC CEO Joe Tucci couldn’t refuse. The arrangement represented great returns for his shareholders, and Tucci got to exit on his terms, telling Elliott to take a hike (even if it was Elliott that got the ball rolling in the first place).

Dell eventually took itself public again in late 2018, probably to help raise some of the money it needed to pay off its debts. We are more than three years past the point where the Dell-EMC deal closed, so we decided to take a look back and see if Dell was wise to take on such debt or not.

What it got with EMC

Source: Tech Crunch

The underpinnings of how app store analytics platforms operate were exposed this week by BuzzFeed, which uncovered the network of mobile apps used by a popular analytics firm Sensor Tower to amass app data. The company had operated at least 20 apps, including VPNs and ad blockers, whose main purpose was to collect app usage data from end users in order to make estimations about app trends and revenues. Unfortunately, these sorts of data collection apps are not new — nor unique to Sensor Tower’s operation.

Sensor Tower was found to operate apps such as Luna VPN, for example, as well as Free and Unlimited VPN, Mobile Data, and Adblock Focus, among others. After BuzzFeed reached out, Apple removed Adblock Focus and Google removed Mobile Data. Others are still being investigated, the report said.

Apps’ collection of usage data has been an ongoing issue across the app stores.

Facebook and Google have both operated such apps, not always transparently, and Sensor Tower’s key rival App Annie continues to do the same today.

Facebook

For Facebook, its 2013 acquisition of VPN app maker Onavo for years served as a competitive advantage. The traffic through the app gave Facebook insight into what other social applications were growing in popularity — so Facebook could either clone their features or acquire them outright. When Apple finally booted Onavo from the App Store half a decade later, Facebook simply brought back the same code in a new wrapper — then called the Facebook Research app. This time, it was a bit more transparent about its data collection, as the Research app was actually paying for the data.

But Apple kicked that app out, too. So Facebook last year launched Study and Viewpoints to further its market research and data collection efforts. These apps are still live today.

Google

Google was also caught doing something similar by way of its Screenwise Meter app, which invited users 18 and up (or 13 if part of a family group) to download the app and participate in the panel. The app’s users allowed Google to collect their app and web usage in exchange for gift cards. But like Facebook, Google’s app used Apple’s Enterprise Certificate program to work — a violation of Apple policy that saw the app removed, again following media coverage. Screenwise Meter returned to the App Store last year and continues to track app usage, among other things, with panelists’ consent.

App Annie

App Annie, a firm that directly competes with Sensor Tower, has acquired mobile data companies and now operates its own set of apps to track app usage under those brands.

In 2014, App Annie bought Distimo, and as of 2016 has run Phone Guardian, a “secure Wi-Fi and VPN” app, under the Distimo brand.

The app discloses its relationship with App Annie in its App Store description, but remains vague about its true purpose:

“Trusted by more than 1 million users, App Annie is the leading global provider of mobile performance estimates. In short, we help app developers build better apps. We build our mobile performance estimates by learning how people use their devices. We do this with the help of this app.”

In 2015, App Annie acquired Mobidia. Since 2017, it has operated a real-time data usage monitor My Data Manager under that brand, as well. The App Store description only offers the same vague disclosure, which means users aren’t likely aware of what they’re agreeing to.

Disclosure?

The problem with apps like App Annie’s and Sensor Tower’s is that they’re marketed as offering a particular function, when their real purpose for existing is entirely another.

The app companies’ defense is that they do disclose and require consent during onboarding. For example, Sensor Tower apps explicitly tell users what is collected and what is not:

App Annie’s app offers a similar disclosure, and takes the extra step of identifying the parent company by name:

App Annie also says its apps can continue to be used even if data-sharing is turned off.

Despite these opt-ins, end users may still not understand that their VPN app is actually tied to a much larger data collection operation. After all, App Annie and Sensor Tower aren’t household names (unless you’re an app publisher or marketer.)

Apple and Google’s responsibility 

Apple and Google, let’s be fair, are also culpable here.

Of course, Google is more pro-data collection because of the nature of its own business as an advertising-powered company. (It even tracks users in the real-world via the Google Maps app.)

Apple, meanwhile, markets itself as a privacy-focused company, so is deserving of increased scrutiny.

It seems unfathomable that, following the Onavo scandal, Apple wouldn’t have taken a closer look into the VPN app category to ensure its apps were compliant with its rules and transparent about the nature of their businesses. In particular, it seems Apple would have paid close attention to apps operated by companies in the app store intelligence business, like App Annie and its subsidiaries.

Apple is surely aware of how these companies acquire data — it’s common industry knowledge. Plus, App Annie’s acquisitions were publicly disclosed.

But Apple is conflicted. It wants to protect app usage and user data (and be known for protecting such data) by not providing any broader app store metrics of its own. However, it also knows that app publishers need such data to operate competitively on the App Store. So instead of being proactive about sweeping the App Store for data collection utilities, it remains reactive by pulling select apps when the media puts them on blast, as BuzzFeed’s report has since done. That allows Apple to maintain a veil of innocence.

But pulling user data directly covertly is only one way to operate. As Facebook and Google have since realized, it’s easier to run these sorts of operations on the App Store if the apps just say, basically, “this is a data collection app,” and/or offer payment for participation — as do many marketing research panels. This is a more transparent relationship from a consumer’s perspective too, as they know they’re agreeing to sell their data.

Meanwhile, Sensor Tower and App Annie competitor Apptopia says it tested then scrapped its own an ad blocker app around six years ago, but claims it never collected data with it. It now favors getting its data directly from its app developer customers.

“We can confidently state that 100% of the proprietary data we collect is from shared App Analytics Accounts where app developers proactively and explicitly share their data with us, and give us the right to use it for modeling,” stated Apptopia Co-founder and COO, Jonathan Kay. “We do not collect any data from mobile panels, third-party apps, or even at the user/device level.”

This system (which is used by the others as well) isn’t necessarily better for end users, as it further obscures the data collection and sharing process. Consumers don’t know which app developers are sharing this data, what data is being shared, or how it’s being utilized. (Fortunately for those who do care, Apple allows users to disable the sharing of diagnostic and usage data from within iOS Settings.)

Data collection done by app analytics firms is only one of many, many ways that apps leak data, however.

In fact, many apps collect personal data — including data that’s far more sensitive than anonymized app usage trends — by way of their included SDKs (software development kits). These tools allow apps to share data with numerous technology companies including ad networks, data brokers, and aggregators, both large and small. It’s not illegal and mainstream users probably don’t know about this either.

Instead, user awareness seems to crop up through conspiracy theories, like “Facebook is listening through the microphone,” without realizing that Facebook collects so much data it doesn’t really need to do so. (Well, except when it does).

In the wake of BuzzFeed’s reporting, Sensor Tower says it’s “taking immediate steps to make Sensor Tower’s connection to our apps perfectly clear, and adding even more visibility around the data their users share with us.”

Apple, Google, and App Annie have been asked for comment. Google isn’t providing an official comment. Apple didn’t respond.

Sensor Tower’s full statement is below:

Our business model is predicated on high-level, macro app trends. As such, we do not collect or store any personally identifiable information (PII) about users on our servers or elsewhere. In fact, based on the way our apps are designed, such data is separated before we could possibly view or interact with it, and all we see are ad creatives being served to users. What we do store is extremely high level, aggregated advertising data that may demonstrate trends that we share with customers.

Our privacy policy follows best practices and makes our data use clear. We want to reiterate that our apps do not collect any PII, and therefore it cannot be shared with any other entity, Sensor Tower or otherwise. We’ve made this very clear in our privacy policy, which users actively opt into during the apps’ onboarding processes after being shown an unambiguous disclaimer detailing what data is shared with us. As a routine matter, and as our business evolves, we’ll always take a privacy-centric approach to new features to help ensure that any PII remains uncollected and is fully safeguarded.

Based on the feedback we’ve received, we’re taking immediate steps to make Sensor Tower’s connection to our apps perfectly clear, and adding even more visibility around the data their users share with us.

App Annie shared the following:

App Annie does not use root certificates at any point in its data collection process.

App Annie discloses that when users opt into data collection (and data sharing is not mandatory to use our apps), data will be shared with App Annie for the purposes of creating market research. We only collect data after users expressly consent to this collection within our apps. We are very transparent, both on the app stores and in the apps themselves and clearly connect App Annie to our mobile apps.

Source: Tech Crunch

Twitter today updated its Developer Policy to clarify rules around data usage, including in academic research, as well as its position on bots, among other things. The policy has also been entirely rewritten in an effort to simplify the language used and make it more conversational, Twitter says. The new policy has been shortened from eight sections to four, and the accompanying Twitter Developer Agreement has been updated to align with the Policy changes, as well.

One of the more notable updates to the new policy is a change to the rules to better support non-commercial research.

Twitter data is used to study topics like spam, abuse, and other areas related to conversation health, the company noted, and it wants these efforts to continue. The revised policy now allows the use of the Twitter API for academic research purposes. In addition, Twitter is simplifying its rules around the redistribution of Twitter data to aid researchers. Now, researchers will be able to share an unlimited number of Tweet IDs and/or User IDs, if they’re doing so on behalf of an academic institution and for the sole purpose of non-commercial research, such as peer review, says Twitter.

The company is also revising rules to clarify how developers are to proceed when the use cases for Twitter data change. In the new policy, developers are informed that they must notify the company of any “substantive” modification to their use case and receive approval before using Twitter content for that purpose. Not doing so will result in suspension and termination of their API and data access, Twitter warns.

The policy additionally outlines when and where “off-Twitter matching” is permitted, meaning when a Twitter account is being associated with a profile built using other data. Either the developer will need to obtain opt-in consent from the user in question, or they can only proceed if the information was provided by the person or is based on publicly available data.

The above changes are focused on ensuring Twitter data is accessible when being used for something of merit, like academic research, and that it’s protected from more questionable use cases.

Finally, the revamped policy clarifies that not all bots are bad. Some even enhance the Twitter experience, the company says, or provide useful information. As examples of good bots, Twitter pointed to the fun account @everycolorbot and informative @earthquakesSF.

Twitter identifies a bot as any account where behaviors like “creating, publishing, and interacting with Tweets or Direct Messages are automated in some way through our API.”

Going forward, developers must specify if they’re operating a bot account, what the account is, and who is behind it. This way, explains Twitter, “it’s easier for everyone on Twitter to know what’s a bot – and what’s not.”

Of course, those operating bots for more nefarious purposes — like spreading propaganda or disinformation — will likely just ignore this policy and hope not to be found. This particular change follows the recent finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate change were coming from bots posting messages of climate change denialism. In addition, it was recently discovered that Trump supporters and QAnon conspiracists were using an app called Power10 to turn their Twitter accounts into bots.

Twitter says since it introduced a new developer review process in July 2018, it’s reviewed over a million developer applications and approved 75%. It also suspended over 144,000 apps from bad actors in the last six months and revamped its developer application to be easier to use. It’s now working on the next generation of the Twitter API and is continuing to explore new products, including through its testing program, Twitter Developer Labs.

Source: Tech Crunch

“Dear Sophie” is an advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I work at a startup and my company is sponsoring me for an EB-2 NIW green card because they didn’t want to deal with PERM. I have some unique skills and am helping create a new technology that will support Americans and create jobs.

We just got hit with a massive Request for Evidence. I’m supposed to marry my American fiancé next month, but I really wanted to immigrate based on my own accomplishments. What should I do?

Marrying in the Marina

Dear Marrying,

I get it. We can strive so hard to achieve everything based on our merit and accomplishments, but for tech professionals who are used to success, it can be frustrating when we’re forced to depend on our employer or our beloved for our future. The startup ecosystem rewards fierce independence, and it can feel uncomfortable to ask others for support.

Source: Tech Crunch

Two video startups are making dueling legal claims against the other.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news yesterday that interactive video company Eko is accusing Quibi of infringing on its patented technology.

At around the same time, The Hollywood Reporter noted  that Quibi (which is launching its short-form mobile video service next month) has filed a complaint in California federal court claiming that Eko has engaged in “a campaign of threats and harassment.”

At the heart of the dispute is Quibi’s Turnstyle technology, which allows viewers to seamlessly switch between landscape- and portrait-mode viewing.

Both companies seem to agree that Eko CEO Yoni Bloch met with Jeffrey Katzenberg in March 2017 (before Katzenberg had even founded Quibi) about a possible investment in Eko, and that there was at least one follow-up meeting between Quibi and Eko employees in 2019.

Eko claims that it provided Quibi employees — both while they were working at Quibi and before then, when they were previously at Snap — with details and code behind its technology. Then, after Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman showed off Turnstyle at CES this year, Eko sent a letter to Quibi claiming that the feature infringed on its intellectual property. (According to the Journal’s story, Eko’s lawyers have sent a letter to Quibi but have not filed a lawsuit.)

“Our Turnstyle technology was developed internally at Quibi by our talented engineers and we have, in fact, received a patent for it,” Quibi said in a statement. “These claims have absolutely no merit and we will vigorously defend ourselves against them in court.”

Meanwhile, in a statement, Eko described Quibi’s technology as “a near-identical copy of its own,” and said the company’s legal motion is “nothing more than a PR stunt”:

It is telling that Quibi filed the motion only after learning the Wall Street Journal was going to publish an article exposing allegations of Quibi’s theft of Eko’s technology … Eko will take the legal actions necessary to defend its intellectual property and looks forward to demonstrating its patent rights to the court.

You can read Quibi’s full complaint below.

Quibi complaint by TechCrunch on Scribd

Source: Tech Crunch

The novel coronavirus is raging across the planet. Millions are quarantined, the stock market is violently gyrating and one of the preeminent VC firms in the Valley is back to saying RIP Good Times. The daily stream of news is terrifying, and we are going to learn even more in the coming weeks.

For founders, the biggest challenge is inoculating their teams from the vagaries of the market so they can do their jobs, continue building momentum against this market adversity and, ultimately, ensure there is enough cash in the bank to avoid layoffs and sustain their company for growth.

I want to talk today about the money details, saving some of those other topics for future posts. What does VC fundraising look like today? What’s going to change in the VC market? What might actually get better about fundraising today than just a few months ago? The daily headlines can be traumatizing, but with the right approach, you can navigate these waters safely.

Volatility affects different VCs differently

Source: Tech Crunch

Reddit, the popular discussion site visited by over 430 million people per month, is opening up some of its most valuable screen real estate to advertisers with the launch of its first trending ad product, the Trending Takeover. The new ad unit will allow brands to reach visitors on two of the most heavily visited areas of Reddit’s website: the Search tab and the Popular feed.

The ad format allows the brands’ campaigns to run across the largest trends on Reddit’s site for 24 hours, Reddit says. The trends section is where users can see what’s currently buzzing and being discussed across the site, similar to the Trends section on Twitter, which can also be targeted by advertisers.

Reddit already offers advertisers the ability to run campaigns across its site in order to raise brand awareness, drive conversions, or generate website traffic, app installs, or video views, among other things. But the new Trending Takeover ad product will allow brands to reach even more potential eyeballs, as Reddit says the Popular feed alone is used by a third of the site’s visitors daily and the Search tab also reaches millions every day.

In addition to the increased visibility, the benefit to this sort of ad format is that a campaign can be designed to align with what’s being talked about in real-time during the day it runs. For instance, a brand could run a trending ad on the day their brand became a part of the trending section organically.

According to eMarketer, Reddit was forecast to generate $119 million in net U.S. ad revenues in 2019, giving it a 0.1% of the overall U.S. digital ad market. But the analyst firm believes that figure will more than double to $261.7 million by 2021, noting how the company continued to roll out new formats like its autoplay in-stream video, cost-per-click, Top Post Takeover slots, and more.

“With millions of searches taking place every day and over one-third of users coming to Reddit’s Popular feed daily, brands can now be part of where cultural trends are born online — Reddit,” said Shariq Rizvi, Vice President of Ads Product and Engineering at Reddit, in a statement. “For Reddit, a large focus for 2020 is about maximizing new and premium opportunities for brands to authentically engage with Reddit users,” Rizvi added.

In beta tests of Trending Takeover, Reddit worked with over 15 partners across entertainment, consumer tech, CPG, automotive, and QSR verticals, it says, including Spotify, Method, and Adobe. The company claims these early testers saw both an increase in conversions and click-throughout rates that were two times more than industry standards for social.

For example, Method used a combination of hand-picked keywords and its own custom creative on the Trending Takeover landing page and saw click-throughs at over two times industry standards. It also was able to use the format to drive video views with a completion rate of four times that of Reddit’s usual Promoted Posts format. The brand had specifically targeted communities like r/houseplants, r/gardening, and r/malelivingspace for a campaign about its household cleaners.

According to a media buyer cited by AdWeek, Promoted Trends on Twitter can cost around $250,000 per day, although pricing is customized. Reddit’s new Trending Takeover ad would probably be a minimum of around $100,000, they estimated. Reddit was not confirming pricing.

Reddit says it’s now selling Trending Takeovers on a reservation, not programmatic, basis. The ads run on both desktop and mobile.

Source: Tech Crunch

The tradition of sitting through a barrage of ads in exchange for being entertained began with radio, flourished with the arrival of television and followed the mass migration online.

As the massive $35 billion in advertising revenue captured by YouTube and Instagram in the last quarter indicated, online advertising around social media, influencers and streamers already represents roughly half of the total amount spent on television advertising at its 2018 peak of $72.4 billion.

Entertainment businesses are under enormous pressure to create new revenue models as linear advertising becomes less relevant to consumers, a potential harbinger for another boom in advertising technology as companies try to keep audiences engaged.

Instagram’s $20 billion advertising haul, first reported by Bloomberg, comes as Alphabet, Google’s parent company, disclosed advertising revenue of $15.1 billion at its YouTube subsidiary for the first time.

Taken together, those figures mean that the market share of advertising commanded by television may shrink to a quarter of all advertising spending sooner than the 2022 prediction from eMarketer, as reported in MarketingLand. While search on Google and Amazon are clear winners — as is Facebook — other technology companies are likely to see a windfall as advertisers chase consumers to new places.

Source: Tech Crunch

Facebook’s latest colonization of Instagram has begun. Facebook is testing the option to cross-post Stories to Instagram, instead of just vice-versa. Hopefully, that means the two apps will finally sync up the ‘already viewed’ status of cross-posted Stories so we don’t have to watch re-runs any more, as I harped about in January.

If fully launched, the cross-posting feature could save social media managers and average users time while letting them maximize the views on the content they create. It could also give a little boost to the total Stories available on Instagram so it algorithm has more to choose from when ranking what it shows first.

But the change could also been seen as the most invasive injection of parent company Facebook’s identity into Instagram — which has been steadily increasing since Instagram’s co-founders left the company in late 2018 as their autonomy dwindled. Facebook has already pasted an “Instagram – From Facebook” title screen into the photo sharing app’s boot-up phase, and added an Open Facebook button its settings menu. Instagram added cross-posting of its Stories to Facebook in October 2017, allowing its parent to piggyback on the popularity of its ephemeral content.

Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, and WhatsApp Status all had 500 million daily users as of a year ago, while Snapchat as a whole has just 218 million users.

The screenshot of the Facebook-to-Instagram cross-posting feature was generated from the Facebook For Android app code by Jane Manchun Wong. She’s the renowned reverse engineering expert whose furnished TechCrunch with tips on dozens of unreleased features that went on to officially launch. When you’ve shot a Facebook Story and are about to post it, you can tap Privacy to review who you’re sharing with. In addition to the Public, Friends, Custom, and Hide From options, Facebook is testing a Share To Instagram toggle that appears to turn on continuous cross-posting of that post and future ones.

A Facebook spokesperson tells me that the company is now formally testing the cross-posting feature to make it easier to share moments with the who matter to you, since people might have different audiences and followers on Facebook versus Instagram. Facebook will continue to explore options for simplifying and improving how Stories work across its apps. That means its’ out of the internal-only prototyping phase and is now being tested with users in the wild.

With any luck, Facebook and Instagram will eventually sync up data about which Stories you’ve watched on either app, and avoid showing you exact copies of ones you’ve already seen. I made my case for this to Instagram’s leadership at a recent press dinner, noting how reruns waste hundreds of millions of people’s time and lead them to close Stories or the app altogether. I asked Facebook about that specifically and declined to comment.

Creating two-way interoperability of Stories is precursor to Facebook’s efforts to unify its Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram Direct chat features. That could extend end-to-end encryption across the apps, protecting messages from prying eyes. But there’s been government grumbling about how encryption could hide the activity of criminals, and some see intertwining the chat features as a way to make it harder for regulators to break up Facebook.

Source: Tech Crunch

Two years ago, dormmates Justin Wenig and Nicholas Diao struggled to get into a popular computer science class at Columbia University . The duo eventually got into that class, but after the initial frustration around class scheduling, they decided “it was an obvious problem for a computer to solve.”

Wenig and Diao are the founders of Coursedog, a software startup that wants to create an operating system for universities to better schedule classes, professors and sections based on demand and interest. “Think of it,” Wenig said, “as a Superhuman for class scheduling systems.”

Today, Coursedog announced it has raised $4.2 million from a crop of investors, including First Round’s Josh Kopelman. The company did not disclose any other investors, and there were no board seats taken on during the financing round. The Y Combinator graduate’s total known venture capital funding is now $5.7 million. Investors in the company include FoundersX Venture, EFund and Jinal Jhaveri, the former CEO of SchoolMint, a school enrollment startup.

The funding will be used to build out Coursedog’s product line on projecting course demand, the correct number of seats a school should offer per course and student success.

“A lot of people think higher [education] is a slow institution, but institutions are really thinking about how to promote student success,” Wenig said in an interview with TechCrunch. But instead of adopting any technology, universities are careful about sharing protected data, he continued.

Competition-wise, Wenig said that Blackboard, a learning management startup, continues to be one of the two “big software tools within universities.” Coursedog sits on top of the other software tool: the student information system, used by administrators that need to plan student schedules.

After Wenig and Diao cold-called hundreds of colleges, Columbia Law School was the first contract signed. Since then, the startup has landed deals with more than 60 colleges and universities of all sizes.

Coursedog’s clientele fits a range. The smallest client, per Wenig, is the Laguna School of Art and Design, which has roughly 600 students. Wenig also noted they cater to a mix of public and private schools, with public schools often “being the most innovative.”

“A lot of states offer incentive-based funding,” Wenig said. “In Utah, the amount of funds you might get from the state as a public institution is directly proportional to how well you’re using your space on campus.” He claims that Coursedog helps improve graduation rates by getting more students into the right classes.

“Today, we are just building apps on top of the Student Information System to help schools with scheduling, curriculum planning and catalog publishing and are slowly eating away functionality that schools would normally be doing with spreadsheets and native to the SIS,” he noted.

Coursedog plans to scale to 100 more universities in the next year, and will use the new funding to help “grow up” its production.

Source: Tech Crunch