Ideaforge

The big accounting firms are under pressure from digital disruption just like every industry these days, but PwC is trying a proactive approach with a digital accelerator program designed to train employees for the next generation of jobs.

To do this, PwC is not just providing some additional training resources and calling it a day. They are allowing employees to take 18 months to two years to completely immerse themselves in learning about a new area. This involves spending half their time on training for their new skill development and half putting that new knowledge to work with clients.

PwC’s Sarah McEneaney, digital talent leader at PwC was put in charge of the program. She said that as a consulting organization, it was important to really focus on the providing a new set of skills for the entire group of employees. That would take a serious commitment, concentrating on a set of emerging technologies. They decided to focus on data and analytics, automation and robotics and AI and machine learning.

Ray Wang, who is founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says this is part of a broader trend around preparing employees inside large organizations for future skills. “Almost every organization around the world is worried about the growing skills gap inside their organizations. Reskilling, continuous learning and hand-on training are back in vogue with the improved economy and war for talent,” he said.

PwC program takes shape

About a year ago the company began designing the program and decided to open it up to everyone in the company from the consulting staff to the support staff with goal of eventually providing a new set of skills across the entire organization of 50,000 employees. As you would expect with a large organization, that started with baby steps.

The company designed the new program as a self-nomination process, rather than having management picked candidates. They wanted self starters, and about 3500 applied. McEneaney considered this a good number, especially since PwC tends to be a risk-averse culture and this was asking employees to leave the normal growth track and take a chance with this new program. Out of the 3500 who applied, they did an initial pilot with 1000 people.

She estimates if a majority of the company’s employees eventually opt in to this retraining regimen, it could cost some serious cash, around $100 million. That’s not an insignificant sum, even for a large company like PwC, but McEneaney believes it should pay for itself fairly quickly. As she put it, customers will respect the fact that the company is modernizing and looking at more efficient ways to do the work they are doing today.

Making it happen

Daniel Krogen, a risk assurance associate at PwC decided to go on the data and analytics track. While he welcomed getting new skills from his company, he admits he was nervous going this route at first because of the typical way his industry has worked in the past. “In the accounting industry you come in and have a track and everyone follows the track. I was worried doing something unique could hinder me if I wasn’t following track,” he said.

He says those fears were alleviated by senior management encouraging people to join this program and giving participants assurances that they would not be penalized. “The firm is dedicated to pushing this and having how we differentiate this against the industry, and we want to invest in all of our staff and push everyone through this,” Krogen said.

McEneaney says she’s a partner at the firm, but it took a change management sell to the executive team and really getting them to look at it as a long-term investment in the future of the business. “I would say a critical factor in the early success of the program has been having buy-in from our senior partner, our CEO and all of his team from the very start,” She reports directly to this team and sees their support and backing as critical to the early success of the program.

Getting real

Members of the program are given a 3-day orientation. After that they follow a self-directed course work. They are encouraged to work together with other people in the program, and this is especially important since people will bring a range of skills to the subject matter from absolute beginners to those with more advanced understanding. People can meet in an office if they are in the same area or a coffee shop or in an online meeting as they prefer.

Each member of the program participates in a Udacity nano-degree program, learning a new set of skills related to whatever technology speciality they have chosen. “We have a pretty flexible culture here…and we trust our people to work in ways that work for them and work together in ways that work for them,” McEneaney explained.

The initial program was presented as a 12-18 month digital accelerator tour of duty, Krogen said. “In those 12-18 months, we are dedicated to this program. We could choose another stint or go back to client work and bring those skills to client services that we previously provided.”

While this program is really just getting off the ground, it’s a step toward acknowledging the changing face of business and technology. Companies like PwC need to be proactive in terms of preparing their own employees for the next generation of jobs, and that’s something every organization should be considering.

Source: Tech Crunch

Homebodies across the U.S. have reason to celebrate. Postmates — the on-demand food delivery service so popular in major cities that it’s a verb now— just launched in 134 new markets. Those 134 new cities mean that Postmates has a presence in 550 cities total across the U.S, including places like Lubbock, Texas; Athens, Georgia; Columbia, South Carolina and Albany, New York.

In April, the company announced that it would partner with Walmart on grocery delivery. The move was meant to offset Amazon’s potential dominance in the space given the online retail giant’s acquisition of Whole Foods last year. Postmates was most recently valued at $1.2 billion after a $300 million influx of funding last month.

In July, Postmates added a wave of more than 100 new cities, bringing its count up to 385 at the time. Now, Postmates claims coverage of 60 percent of households in the U.S., showing that the company is serious about taking Bay Area-centric on-demand luxuries and its own delivery infrastructure far beyond Silicon Valley.

Source: Tech Crunch

Lensabl, the company that has built a business putting prescription lenses into any style of glasses frame, has raised $3.7 million in a new round of funding. 

Based in Los Angeles, Lensabl already has an agreement inked with the city’s latest tech wunderkind, partnering with the spectacles producing augmented reality luminaries at Snap.

“We are the preferred prescription provider of Snapchat Spectacles,” says Lensabl chief executive Andrew Bilinsky. “[And] we are already talking to and partnering with a variety of brands to start and scale their prescription operations [and] really scale our direct to consumer lens business.”

Powering that effort is the new $3.7 million in funding which came from a clutch of big name strategic partners, venture firms and individual angel investors. Rogue Venture Partners, the same lead investor behind SightBox, a contact lens subscription business acquired by Johnson & Johnson, led the round. And additional investors including Birchmere Ventures, Aspect Ventures, Cherry Tree Investments, Amplify, Luma Launch, Watertower Ventures, and Crowdsmart (a crowdfunding platform) also participated in the financing.

For Bilinsky, the opportunity in setting up a business exclusively focused on filling prescriptions means reduced prices and better options for the estimated 188.7 million people who wear corrective eyewear or contact lenses in the U.S.

“We’re offering every different type of prescription lens for every different frame brand,” says Biinsky. “[We’re] mimicking what a customer can do going into a Lens Crafters at up to 70% cheaper than a traditional provider.”

And given the changing ways in which glasses buyers are shopping for frames, launching a business that caters to providing the right lenses at a lower price makes sense, Bilinsky says.

“With Amazon becoming the largest individual reseller of eyewear in the U.S., every frame that people buy that needs to be re-lensed. It’s a secondary market in the same way that you would put new rims on the car,” says Billinsky.

Lensabl offers about 400 different permutations of lenses and 20 different tint colors. “It’s a customization platform for your frames,” says Bilinsky.

Source: Tech Crunch

Coinbase’s newest asset is live. On Tuesday the popular U.S.-based cryptocurrency platform added support for ZRX, the token representing the 0x Project. On Coinbase, ZRX joins the rarified ranks of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin.

The addition doesn’t come as a surprise. Last week, Coinbase added ZRX to Coinbase Pro, the so-called “evolution of GDAX,” Coinbase’s more feature-rich trading platform. Coinbase also previously signaled its intentions to “explore” the addition of a number of new cryptocurrencies including 0x (ZRX), Cardano (ADA), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Stellar Lumens (XLM) and Zcash (ZEC).

By showing its hand well in advance and being more transparent about its regulatory hurdles, the platform will hopefully avoid another debacle like the volatile launch of Bitcoin Cash last December, which prompted an insider trading investigation.

“One of the most common requests we hear from customers is to be able to trade more assets on Coinbase,” Coinbase said in a blog post.

ZRX should show up soon for most users across the desktop, iOS and Android versions of Coinbase. At launch time, ZRX won’t be available in the state of New York or the United Kingdom due to unresolved regulatory issues.

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s going to be harder for trolls to disrupt Periscope broadcasts. The Twitter-owned live streaming app has offered chat moderation capabilities for years, but it has so far relied on group moderation. That means when users flagged a comment as abuse, spam or harassment, Periscope would randomly select a few other viewers to take a look and decide if that’s true. Violators would be banned if the users agreed. That worked well in some cases, but it still put control in the hands of the crowd, not the live streamer. Now, Periscope is changing that.

Instead of relying solely on group moderation, the company says broadcasters will instead be allowed to assign chat moderators before they start streaming.

These moderators can then watch the chat during the live broadcast and actively mute commenters in the audience who are disruptive.

After being muted, the person will not be allowed to chat for the remainder of the broadcast. This muting activity will be visible to anyone joining the broadcast from either Periscope or Twitter, but assigning chat moderators can only be done from Periscope, the company says.

When the live stream wraps, the broadcaster can then view a list of all the muted accounts and can choose to block those users from joining in future broadcasts.

The addition, which arrived alongside new replay editing tools, is another step towards improving the health of conversations on Periscope, the company claims. It follows another change announced this past summer, which focused on stricter enforcement of its rules around abuse and harassment.

Before, trolls whose comments were flagged during a broadcast were only temporarily blocked from chatting. They wouldn’t be able to comment on that live broadcast, but they could still join others in the future and continue to disrupt, threaten or abuse the video creator or the community.

The change that rolled out this summer made it so that those people who repeatedly got suspended for violating the guidelines would have their Periscope accounts reviewed and suspended.

Online harassment is not a new problem, to be sure, but the major social platforms have been struggling to get a handle on the issues.

In Twitter’s case, in particular, it’s been called out for being too tolerant of online harassment and hate speech, under the guise of protecting free speech. But Twitter has been trying to better handle abuse complaints, in more recent months, including through the acquisition of anti-abuse technology provider Smyte, which is helping to automate some of the processes here, as well as with the rollout of more stringent policies and anti-abuse features. Periscope hasn’t received as much attention, but is focusing on reducing the abuse that occurs during the real time conversations on live broadcasts.

More info on how the new chat moderation feature works is here.

 

Source: Tech Crunch

“Conversational marketing” is a phrase that I hear a lot, but when the team at AdLingo uses it, they mean something specific — namely, bringing chatbots and other conversational assistants into online advertising.

The startup is part of Google’s Area 120, and co-founder and general manager Vic Fatnani said he’s worked on advertising at Google for more than a decade.

“One of the things we saw happening was this paradigm shift with users and consumers going towards more of a conversational medium,” he said. “Everything is becoming more conversational, whether it’s through devices such as your phone, your speaker and eventually your car … We asked ourselves, ‘Hey if this shift is happening, why can’t marketing be more conversational?’”

You may be wondering whether consumers are really clamoring to interact with ads, but Fatnani said he and his co-founder Dario Rapisardi were determined not to build “a solution that needs a problem,” so they spent months talking to marketers and chatbot developers.

Apparently, when they asked about what challenges everyone was facing, the big answer was “discovery.” As Fatnani put it, “Hey, I have this amazing conversational assistant, but it’s really hard for me to bring this in front of audience.”

In his view, advertising provides the perfect medium to solve this problem. Instead of building a chatbot and just letting consumers find it on their own website or app, brands can integrate it into their advertising, allowing people who see the ad to ask questions and provide feedback.

“Imagine you want to launch a new soda drink in Brazil, a market that you’ve never entered before,” he added. “Imagine you can now run a conversational display ad and actually have people vote to say what kind of flavor would you like to drink.”

Or for a real example, there’s the Allstar Kia experience that you can see at the top of this post. Che company’s director of internet marketing Chris Ferrall said in a statement that “AdLingo lets our customers browse inventory, determine car trade-in value and make an appointment with a salesperson — all within an engaging, interactive experience that meets them right where they are.”

To be clear, Adlingo isn’t building the chatbots. Instead, Fatnani said, “The brands and developers bring the conversational experience to us, and we distribute that experience all over the web.”

To do this, the platform integrates with chatbot tools like Dialogue Flow, Microsoftbot Framework, LiveEngage and Blip. It’s also partnered with Valassis Digital and LivePerson (the Kia campaign happened through Valassis).

How does this all fit into Google’s larger plans for advertising? Fatnani said it doesn’t, at least not yet.

“We are completely separate efforts in terms of our product roadmap and what we execute,” he said, later adding, “At this point, we just want to make sure we’re really, really focused on our customer.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Twitter users on iOS were hit with a strange bug today. Instead of receiving notifications that included the tweet itself, they received a string of alphanumeric characters. The issue only affected iOS users, we confirmed with the company, and has since been resolved.

Twitter was quick to address the problem, following complaints from Twitter users about the weird notifications.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey posted at 12:42 PM ET today that Twitter was aware of the issue and was working on a fix.

Minutes later, he tweeted again that the issue was resolved.

We asked Twitter for more details on what went wrong, as a lot of people were wondering why their phones’ notification screen looked like this.

Some were also concerned it was a security issue of some kind, and didn’t know if a password reset was in order.

Twitter now says the issue was only a bug – nothing to be concerned about.

The company pointed us to a tweet from its Support channel (see below), which explains the issue in layman’s terms. It says the bug was related to the code used for iOS notifications – specifically the “red bubbles” (meaning the app icon’s badges).

Normally, you would not see this in “numbers and code,” Twitter explains.

Or, as @Jack put it in more technical terms: “We send an invisible background notification to the app with badge counts (mainly unread notifications, DMs, etc.). The issue caused these notifications to become visible for a short period of time. We don’t know exactly why, but quickly reverted.”

In any event, the issue is fixed, it’s not a hack, and we can all rest easy.

Whew. 

Source: Tech Crunch

Lyft and Uber’s race to an IPO is heating up.

Lyft has selected JPMorgan Chase & Co. as the lead underwriter of its initial public offering along with Credit Suisse Group and Jefferies Group, the WSJ reported, citing “people familiar with the company’s plans.”

Lyft declined to comment.

Lyft is expected to file an IPO in the first half of 2019. Choosing an underwriter marks the next official step in the process. Meanwhile, Uber is making it’s own preparations.

Uber, which has received proposals from banks that placed its value as much as $120 billion, is also considering an early 2019 listing.

Some people familiar with the plan said Lyft’s valuation will exceed the $15.1 billion it was valued earlier this year. While Lyft’s value is still considerably lower than Uber’s, it’s on the upswing.

Lyft said in June 2018 that it raised an additional $600 million in a Series I financing round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company, pushing its post-money valuation to $15.1 billion. The valuation had more than doubled in a 14-month span.

Lyft has spent the past 18 months aggressively expanding into new U.S. cities, as well as into Canada and pursuing its autonomous vehicle ambitions. Lyft has increased its market share in the U.S. to 35 percent. In January 2017, Lyft had just 22 percent market share in the United States.

Lyft has raised $2.9 billion in primary capital since April 2017. In total, Lyft has raised $5.1 billion since its inception.

Source: Tech Crunch

Y Combinator has released the results of a survey, completed in partnership with its portfolio company Callisto, highlighting the pervasive role of sexual harassment in venture capital and technology startups.

Callisto, a sexual misconduct reporting software built for victims, is a graduate of YC’s winter 2018 class. The company sent a survey to 125 of YC’s 384 female founders, asking if they had been “assaulted or coerced by an angel or VC investor in their startup career.”

Eighty-eight female founders completed the survey; 19 in total claimed to have experienced some form of harassment.

More specifically, 18 said that inappropriate experience consisted of “unwanted sexual overtures;” 15 said it was “sexual coercion;” four said it was “unwanted sexual contact.”

As part of the release of the survey findings, YC announced they’ve established a formal process for their founders to report harassment and assault within Bookface, the startup accelerator’s private digital portal for its founders.

“You can report at any time, even years after the incident took place,” YC wrote in the blog post. “The report will remain confidential. We encourage other investors to set up similar reporting systems.”

First Round Capital is another investor to recently poll its founders on issues of sexual misconduct. Similarly, the early-stage investor found that half of the 869 founders polled were harassed or knew a victim of workplace harassment.

As for Callisto, the 7-year-old non-profit said it will launch Callisto for founders, a new tool that will support victims. Using Callisto, founders can record the identities of perpetrators in the tech and VC industry. The company will collect the information and refer victims to a lawyer who will provide free advice and the option to share their information with other victims of the same perpetrator. From there, victims can decide if they want to go public together with their accusations.

Tech’s widespread sexual harassment problem is not new, but more women and victims of harassment have come forward in recent years as the #MeToo movement encourages them to name their harassers. Justin Caldbeck, formerly of Binary Capital, and former SoFi chief executive officer Mike Cagney are among the Silicon Valley elite to be ousted amid allegations of sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era.

Source: Tech Crunch

A lot of people leave their jobs because of bosses they can’t stand. Yet it’s seldom the case that a former employee publicly badmouths management after the fact. The obvious risk in doing so: future employers might not want to gamble on this person badmouthing them at a later date.

That isn’t stopping Morgan Knutson, a UI designer who seven years ago, spent eight months at Google working on its recently shuttered social networking product Google+ and who, in light of the shutdown, decided to share on Twitter his personal experience with how “awful the project and exec team was.”

This will be a super slow burn that goes back many years. I’ll continue to add to over the next couple of days. I’ll preface it with a bunch of backstory and explain what I had left behind, which made me more unhappy about the culture I had come into.

— Morgan (@morganknutson) October 11, 2018

It’s a fairly long read, but among his most notable complaints is that former Google SVP Vic Gundotra, who oversaw Google+, ruled by fear and never bothered to talk with Knutson, whose desk was “directly next to Vic’s glass-walled office. He would walk by my desk dozens of times during the day. He could see my screen from his desk. During the 8 months I was there, culminating in me leading the redesign of his product, Vic didn’t say a word to me. No hello. No goodbye, or thanks for staying late. No handshake. No eye contact.”

Vic was powerful at Google. He had buy-in from the top and he wielded that stick aggressively. He made Plus as pervasive as he could. Each product org had a mandate to integrate its social features.

— Morgan (@morganknutson) October 12, 2018

He also says Gundotra essentially bribed other teams within Google to incorporate Google+’s features into their products by promising them handsome financial rewards for doing so atop their yearly bonuses. “You read that correctly, “tweeted Knutson. “A f*ck ton of money to ruin the product you were building with bloated garbage that no one wanted.”

Gundotra is today the cofounder and CEO of AliveCor, maker of a device that captures a “medical grade” E.K.G. within 30 seconds; AliveCor has gone on to raise $30 million from investors, including the Mayo Clinic.

Asked about Knutson’s characterization of him, Gundotra suggested the rant was “absurd” but otherwise declined to comment.

Knutson disparages even more strongly a former manager that he calls “Greg” and he portrays a fellow designer, Jim, as paranoid and vindictive. Indeed, in describing how his unit was organized, Knutson paints a picture of a political, haphazard, wasteful and ultimately disappointing division where it was never quite clear who should be working on what or why. In fact, though he says he thought he was “joining the big leagues” when recruited by Google, Knutson wound up taking a job with Dropbox shortly afterward in order to escape from the corporate leviathan.

It also sounds from his own telling like Knutson might have been canned eventually.

No matter what you think of the tweets, it’s an interesting narrative and it’s instructive as one insider’s view onto what — other than Facebook’s stranglehold on users — may have ultimately doomed Google+, which was shut down last week due to lack of user and developer adoption (even while a business version of the network lives on for the foreseeable future).

The biggest takeaway: like many other gigantic companies, Google has its fair share of flaws.

You can check out the full tweetstorm here.

Thread Reader has also published them in a more palatable format here.

Source: Tech Crunch