Author : zebethcontrol

Joby, Delta Air Lines to pilot home-to-airport eVTOL transportation • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Delta Airlines, eVTOL, Joby Aviation, TransportationNo Comments

Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft startup Joby Aviation is partnering with Delta Airlines to deliver “home-to-airport” transportation services to Delta customers starting in New York and Los Angeles — although it might be more accurate to call it a “neighborhood-to-airport” service, one that will rely on a network of local vertiports to fly customers quickly and greenly to the airport. During a press briefing Monday, the companies were scant about certain details, like when exactly they hope to launch this service, how much it might cost and how many Joby eVTOL vehicles would be involved. However, they did share that the deal involved an upfront equity investment from Delta of $60 million, or about 2% stake in Joby, with an additional $200 million to come if certain unspecified milestones are met. While Joby will still run its own standard airport service in priority markets, the partnership with Delta will be mutually exclusive in the U.S. and the U.K. for five years following commercial launch, with the possibility of extending that period. The move not only allows Delta to offer customers a premium service, but also gives Joby a smoother route to commercialization. As part of the deal, Joby will operate the eVTOL service, but Delta will provide the airport infrastructure, one of the four hurdles Joby needs to jump in order to launch a commercial service. “That last piece is one of the reasons we’re so incredibly excited about the opportunity with Delta,” Joby founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt told ZebethMedia. “Delta has invested billions of dollars in airport infrastructure and has really deep and important relationships with the airports in both New York and LA.” That said, Delta has yet to begin discussions on vertiport production with John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia in New York or Los Angeles International, according to Delta CEO Ed Bastian. The other three hurdles, as outlined by Bevirt on Monday, largely revolve around certifications. Joby achieved one of them in May when the company secured its Part 135 Air Carrier certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which allows it to begin on-demand commercial air taxi operations. Before Joby can actually launch, the company must first also secure Type Certification on its aircraft and Production Certification on its production facilities. What can Delta customers expect? Getting stuck in traffic to and from airports can easily add several hours to what is often already a long day of traveling. Bevirt said a typical New York eVTOL flight to the airport could cut that travel time down to just 10 minutes. But first, they’ll have to get to their local vertiport. Although Joby has a partnership with Reef Technologies to convert parking garages in several cities into vertirports, for the partnership with Delta, Joby said it would initially start by tapping existing helipad infrastructure throughout NY and LA. There are three heliports in NYC — one on East 34th Street, another down by Wall Street and a third on West 30th Street. Los Angeles has a handful more that are mainly scattered around the northern suburbs of the city. When Delta customers go to book a flight, either through the app or online, they’ll have an option to also book a seat in one of Joby’s shared, five-seater aircraft to the airport. Joby also has a partnership with Uber that will allow customers to book Joby rides through the Uber app, so Bevirt said it was possible Uber rides to and from local vertiports might be included in the Delta service one day. Once at the airport, customers will continue with a streamlined Delta experience. The airline has been investing in digital identity technology, which will allow customers to move through the airport using facial matching rather than having to show a boarding pass or government ID. “We will be working together with the airport authorities to try to have as fast of a flow through security, ultimately, hopefully, on the other side of security and you can potentially even land on the on the tarmac itself but that’s kind of a future state,” said Bastian at Monday’s briefing. The vertiports won’t be Delta branded, but they will be located close enough to Delta lounges and terminals to give users “easy access into the Delta premium airport experience,” said Bastian. “A premium experience doesn’t necessarily have to translate to a premium price,” said Bevirt. “We want this to be a really compelling price point.” What that price point will be, however, is anyone’s guess. Since the partnership is still in its early days, Joby and Delta were unable to provide a ballpark cost for such a service. Bevirt said he hopes Joby can keep prices down by relying on cost savings provided by the company’s electric propulsion system, which has lower maintenance and operating costs.

Factorial adds $120M and doubles valuation to $1B to build enterprise-quality HR for SMBs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in EnterpriseNo Comments

Small and medium businesses, long overlooked in the building of innovative technology, have lately become a key focus in the world of B2B software. Now, a startup called Factorial — one of the bigger players in the area of building HR technology for SMBs — is announcing a big fundraise at a “unicorn” valuation that underscores that trend. The Barcelona startup has raised $120 million, a Series C that is not only one of the biggest for Spain, but one of the biggest currently coming out of Europe. Led by Atomico, the round also included GIC as well as past investors Tiger Global, CRV, K-Fund and Creandum. This all-equity round is notable not just for its size, but for the price tag it confers on the startup: Factorial is now valued at $1 billion, double its valuation a year ago when it raised $80 million. The company will use the funding continue building out more technology and product — expense cards is the next launch that is currently in a quiet beta mode — as well as for acquisitions and for deeper geographical expansion. Factorial to date has picked up some 7,000 customers across Europe in countries like the UK and Germany (corresponding to hundreds of thousands of users, with the average size of its customers between 50 and 250 employees), but its biggest segment has been the Latino (Spanish and Portuguese) world, which includes not only Spain and Portugal but a number of developing markets (together numbering almost 30 countries, plus countless others where it’s a common if not an official language). This latter group also represents Factorial’s biggest engine for growth. While developed markets like the U.S, UK and Western Europe is full of competition for SMB-focused startups building productivity and operational apps for SMBs, in developing countries Factorial has been a trailblazer in connecting with the small business segment to sell them products to handle human resources like their larger counterparts. Pooling those Latino markets together, “We can together potentially sell to 10 million customers,” Romero said. “But but we only have 7,000 customers. Our market share is ridiculously small and it’s mostly greenfield.” The company says that since 2019, it’s been growing at over 200% annually with no sign of that rate slowing down with the hit, or in the slow aftermath, of the Covid-19 pandemic. Customers include divisions of Booking.com, Freshly, Vicio and more. Factorial’s rise is coming at an inflection point in the macroeconomic sphere. All eyes are on the job market these days, with rises and falls of unemployment not just a bellwether of the wider economy, but for many of us one of the more direct hits — compared to more abstract indicators like interest and exchange rates — when it comes to how we feel the pinch. But ironically, the world of employment has had another focus — as a problem for tech startups to tackle. Factorial’s raise, and rise, thus seems to indicate that at least for itself, that focus appears to be resistant to those ups and downs and if anything it’s building tools that businesses are finding are essential to running their HR operations efficiently, regardless of the economic climate. CEO Jordi Romero, along with CRO Bernat Farrero and CTO Pau Ramon built out the business with the larger aim of creating, essentially, a “Workday” for the kinds of companies that typically are too small to buy, implement and use enterprise tools. The key to doing that has to keep barriers to adoption and use very low, Romero said in an interview. “Everything we do is about user experience and making things simple for employees,” he said. “You should be able to just onboard a customer or employee and run reports.” The company’s product, meanwhile, has been slowly expanding into an all-in-one productivity platform for all things employee-related. That includes shift and holiday management; on-boarding and off-boarding of workers; performance management; payroll; expenses; organization charts; and even internal workplace communications — all bundled under very straightforward pricing (and no freemium tier). Notably, a lot of that to-date has been built in-house, a route Factorial plans to continue traveling as it grows. “We have our own products because we want to use the same playbook for all of them, focused on what we believe has been the core of the problem for SMBs” — tools have been not fit for purpose essentially, being too expensive or too hard to adopt, he said. “That is our DNA, and that is why we need to keep building the product from he ground up.” (There are exceptions to this, Romero noted, due to localized needs: Payroll, for example, is available in nine markets and in each of those Factorial integrates with local companies that actually run the process.) The tech investment market, and the tech market overall, has undoubtedly been contracting this year. That has meant that investors definitely have the upper hand when it comes to term sheets, but it’s also spelled out other kinds of dynamics: VCs are often coalescing around safer bets rather than moonshots. Put these two together, and there remain examples of startups still seeing strong valuations and competition when it comes to letting people into their rounds. The metrics Factorial’s been seeing, and that bigger market opportunity that it has found and is successfully targeting, have put the startup into that currently rare spot. “We have been following Factorial for a long time,” Atomico partner Luca Eisenstecken told me in an interview. He said that the fact that Factorial’s managed to sustain strong growth through the rise and dip of the pandemic economy, “and to keep that growth up at scale”, were two important points. Atomico spoke with customers, too, and while he wouldn’t disclose retention numbers, he described them to me as “massive.” “Those metrics, combined with customer satisfaction, we think there is something special going on. It became abundantly clear how big of a problem HR is for these small businesses, and how

Why Do WordPress Themes Have to Be So Hard to Use on the Backend? (Hint: They Don’t!)

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Articles, wordpressTagged wordpress theme backendNo Comments

Whether you’ve designed websites with only a small handful of WordPress themes or have used dozens of them over the years, we can all agree on one thing: Many WordPress themes that are visually stunning on the frontend of a website end up being ugly as sin and difficult to use on the backend. Why does it have to be that way? It doesn’t. If a WordPress theme looks and feels great on the frontend, there’s no reason why its backend doesn’t as well. BeTheme is proof of this. BeTheme is one of the top 5 best-selling WordPress themes of all time, with more than 260,000 sales and a 4.83-star user rating. In this post, we’re going to show you some of the ways in which this WordPress theme backend is going to make your life easier as a web designer. Upgrade your workflow with a WordPress theme backend that doesn’t suck After you install BeTheme, you’re going to notice something is different. Gone is the drab and oftentimes cluttered and unintuitive backend of WordPress. In its place, you’ll find a clean, attractive, and useful theme dashboard and tools. Don’t worry. WordPress and all of its content management tools are still there. But when you’re inside of BeTheme, you’ll find yourself in a space that is at once visually appealing and so easy to use you’ll wonder why the rest of WordPress isn’t built this way. If you haven’t been inside of BeTheme before (or even lately), join us as we walk through some of its best and most useful backend features: 1. Dashboard design Your BeTheme dashboard will appear directly under the main WordPress Dashboard link. So there’s no need to sift through the sidebar trying to figure out where your theme settings are. It’s not just convenient access that makes the BeTheme dashboard great. Click on BeTheme or the Dashboard link and you’ll discover: Navigation bar that takes you to the most commonly used BeTheme toolsStatus and plugin updatesStep-by-step website creatorNew feature announcementsLatest pre-built websitesTheme registration informationPopular BeTheme integrations Everything in the dashboard is here for the express purpose of helping you get more out of your WordPress theme. Whether it’s streamlining your website setup or discovering new features to use, the dashboard is there to help. 2. Dark/light mode The research on dark mode and the benefits associated with it is inconclusive. That said, enough people have shown a preference for dark mode (which is why popular devices and apps offer the option now), so it could demonstrate big benefits on an individual basis. The most common benefits that users report are reduced eye strain, better sleep, and longer lasting device batteries when using dark mode. As a web designer, you’re working in front of a computer screen all day. If you find dark mode to be beneficial for any of these reasons, then you should find yourself a WordPress theme backend like BeTheme’s that enables you to toggle on dark mode. 3. Step-by-step website creator When you first install a WordPress theme, it’s not always clear where you should go next. For instance, you know that your theme comes with demos, but where do you go to find them? Some themes bury their demos or pre-built websites inside their settings panel, so it can take some digging around. BeTheme removes all the guesswork. You’ll find the Setup Wizard under BeTheme as well as in the dashboard. Click on it and the step-by-step website creator will help you: Name your website.Choose your preferred editing mode.Select a page builder to work in.Pick the perfect pre-built website for your industry/niche.Remove existing content and replace it with your new site. This whole process takes less than 30 seconds to complete — from the moment you click the setup wizard button to the time it takes to load your new site and page builder into WordPress. 4. Pre-built site previews BeTheme has over 650 pre-built websites, with new ones being added to the collection all the time. You’ll find them under the Websites link in the dashboard or under Pre-built websites under the BeTheme sidebar menu. As a web designer, you’ll quickly become acquainted with the options that are available — and you may even find favorites you prefer to start with. That said, you want to make sure you’re always designing websites using the latest and greatest design trends and styles. Because of this, BeTheme places previews of its newest pre-built sites in your dashboard. Having the newest themes front and center will be useful in a number of ways. For starters, you’ll know when you have new sites to design with. Even if you choose not to use those sites (because you already have one you like, for instance), seeing the latest styles and features will be a good source of inspiration. Either way, this will enable you to utilize the latest design trends in your website designs going forward. 5. Plugin manager The Plugins area of BeTheme isn’t the same thing as the Plugins area in WordPress. While there is some overlap, the purpose of the BeTheme plugins manager is to give you a place to: View your actively installed plugins.Update plugins that need it.Install and activate recommended plugins for your pre-built website only when you need them. It’s the last point that’s important to take note of. You won’t see any of these plugins in the WordPress plugins manager until you’ve installed them. These recommendations come directly from BeTheme and can help you get more out of your theme and pre-built site. On the flipside of that, not installing them can also help you cut back on unnecessary plugins which will allow you to keep website performance high. 6. BeTheme support WordPress might be the most powerful and popular content management system in the world. However, it’s a mostly community-driven platform when it comes to themes, plugins, and even providing support. You shouldn’t have to dig through forum after forum on the WordPress.org website to find

NocoDB takes on Airtable with open source no-code platform that connects to production databases • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Airtable, Apps, Baserow, Enterprise, no code, NocoDB, open sourceNo Comments

A new company is setting out to challenge Airtable, the 10-year-old company recently valued at a whopping $11 billion, with a slightly different take on what it means to be a no-code database platform. NocoDB is one of a number of startups to emerge on the scene with plans to usurp the mighty Airtable, with an open source foundation serving as a core selling point. While NocoDB works in a similar fashion in terms of allowing non-technical users to create fresh databases, its twist is that it also works directly on live “production” data that resides in databases such as Postrgres, MySQL, or MariaDB, or data warehouses, and turns them into what it calls a “smart spreadsheet”. This allows anyone to leverage legacy databases without needing IT’s input — no SQL queries or code required. It’s all about enabling business, finance, or even marketing teams to connect to live data and collaborate with developers to build no-code applications. U.K.-based founder and CEO Naveen Rudrappa claims that the core open source project has already been used by more than 2,000 companies including behemoths such as Google, Walmart, American Express, and McAfee. “The adoption we’ve seen has been really unprecedented — we’ve had 7 million Docker downloads within one year of launch and more than 30,000 GitHub stars, putting us amongst the top 350 open source projects in the world,” Rudrappa told ZebethMedia. NocoDB: Grid view Image Credits: NocoDB A little more than a year on from its inception, the company is announcing a sizeable seed funding round from a veritable who’s who from the angel investment world. The funding has in fact dripped in over a couple of tranches since its incorporation in June last year, but in total the round amounts to around $10.5 million, with institutional backers including Decibel, OSS Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Together.fund. The angel side, meanwhile, includes YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley; WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg; RedHat cofounder Bob Young; early Google investor Ram Shriram; and founders from Cloudera, CockroachDB, PipeDream, Talend, AngelList, BrightRoll, and Freshworks. The story so far The genesis of NocoDB can be traced back to 2017, when Rudrappa was working on a related open source database “passion project” under a different name, one that was purely a backend with no user interface at all. The problem he was trying to solve involved creating APIs to access a MySQL database of U.K. real estate data — something that wasn’t easy to achieve. “I realized that the fundamental problem of making a database API-accessible still remained unsolved,” Rudrappa said. “So, I built a prototype, released it on GitHub, and the next morning woke up to see a thousand GitHub stars for my project. The problem was much more widespread than I had imagined and my initial prototype had struck a chord with the users. This hobby project received a quarter of a million downloads, then I decided to team up with a friend and started building NocoDB.” When NocoDB arrived on GitHub last year, Rudrappa said that it garnered more than a million downloads within the first ten weeks. “Live production data stores, like MySQL or Snowflake, are intimidating for business users, or even to developers who aren’t used to working with the backend tech stack,” he said. “But they need access to this data in order to build useful applications quickly. NocoDB makes it possible to connect any organizational data source to the universally well-understood spreadsheet interface, allowing users with zero coding experience to build workflows and automations that work in concert with real business data.” With $10.5 million in the bank, and the support of some of the biggest names from the technology sphere, NocoDB is well-positioned to build out a commercial component to the main open source project. This includes a new premium incarnation that’s currently in private beta, one that allows companies to connect to Oracle Database and Snowflake. “This commercial version is a request from the customer side, as they need a working contract with us when they use the software,” Rudrappa explained. “Enterprise customers need different support, and we want to accommodate that while also balancing the needs of our open source community.” On top of that, NocoDB is also working on a managed and hosted cloud version, replete with enterprise-grade features including connectors, single sign-on (SSO), access control, auditing, and more.

GM is in the energy business now • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in General Motors, GM, Tesla, TransportationNo Comments

General Motors is launching a new line of energy products to homeowners, businesses and utilities — the next step in an EV offensive designed to generate revenue beyond making and selling electric vehicles and aimed directly at Tesla. The product line will be housed under a new business unit called GM Energy and covers the gamut of EV ownership, including stationary energy storage, solar through a partnership with Sun Run and bi-directional charging technology to deliver power from the vehicle to their home or to the grid. GM Energy has also developed a cloud product that houses data and management software and helps tie all of these hardware products together and ultimately, balance out the power grid while providing an incentive to EV owners. The new business unit has also developed large-scale batteries for utilities as well as hydrogen fuel cells, Travis Hester, vice president of GM’s EV growth operations, told ZebethMedia in a recent interview. GM Energy is divided into three sectors covering residential, commercial and charging. Each sector carries the Ultium name, the same branding that GM gave to the next-generation electric vehicle platform and batteries of its new and upcoming EVs. The home energy system, which includes stationary storage similar to Tesla’s Powerwall product, will debut with the launch of the 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV. GM did not release pricing information on its new products. The pitch to homeowners The Ultium Home line includes stationary battery called Powervault, an EV charger, solar through its partner Sun Run and a controller box that will link everything together. But GM’s big pitch to consumers isn’t just about how stationary storage can keep the lights on at home during a blackout or even how solar energy can charge their EV. Instead, GM is also touting a system that will allow consumers to sell energy from their EV and stationary storage batteries back to utilities during peak, high energy consumption periods. The business unit already has a pilot project with Pacific Gas and Electric Company that lets residential customers use their compatible EVs along with a bi-directional charger, as backup power for essential home needs during short-term power outages. The companies expect to expand the vehicle-to-home service in 2023 to a subset of residential customers within PG&E’s service area. Hester said GM also has a partnership with an unnamed real estate developer in California for a 3,000-home development that will have a pre-installed charger, Powervault, solar and controller box to links them all together in every residence. The pitch to commercial businesses Image Credits: GM The Ultium commercial line includes much larger megawatt-sized batteries for energy storage as well as a cloud services product that houses data and energy management software. The megawatt storage battery, similar in some ways to Tesla’s Megapack, already has garnered interest from commercial business and utilities, according to Hester. About 10 companies have signed on for either pilot programs or to buy the batteries and accompanying software. The commercial line is close, but not identical, to what Tesla has been selling. GM Energy is also marketing fuel cells, specifically selling the electrolyzer used to make hydrogen that then goes into the fuel cell. This fuel cell product can be sent into the stationary storage battery or directly into the grid, Hester said. The final piece, called Energy Services Cloud, is what Hester describes as the brains of the operation. This hub of GM Energy’s products can be used by residential, fleet and commercial customers to manage their energy consumption through software applications. The cloud product, which can fold into a utility’s software, is a conduit of information between customers and the grid. “It will help us understand and be able to manage energy rates on a per state basis and just understand what blackouts or low energy supply issues we are going to have,” Hester said, adding it also helps manage customer behavior. For instance, the cloud product can calculate spare capacity and then communicate to consumers through an app or web browser to plug in their EVs. The GM Energy cloud service and software can then take little pieces of consumers’ battery capacity (for those who sign onto this) and aggregate that together and offer it up to utilities. The EV owner would then receive payment from the arrangement, which could be applied to a car payment or just taken as revenue, Hester said. “So this is a very, very powerful tool that we’ve been building,” Hester said. “This energy cloud is going to help us with knowing how and when to talk to a large amount of customers. If we want to go access a million customers in a few minutes, we have to have ways to go do that and then to be able to talk to the utilities about what energy they need, and be able to manage behavior en masse.” Some residential customers are already enrolled in an EV charging management program through their utility that uses the Energy Services Cloud. GM Energy is also working with Con Edison, Graniterock and New Hampshire Electric Cooperative (NHEC), according to the automaker. Power balance Image Credits: GM The global automotive industry is in the midst of a shift away from internal combustion engines towards electrified vehicles. Against that backdrop, the problem of an aging, overloaded power grid looms. This isn’t just a problem in developing countries. Power outages in the United States have become increasingly common. On average, U.S. electricity customers experienced just over eight hours of electric power interruptions in 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It’s the highest figure since the EIA began collecting electricity reliability data in 2013. And while researchers note that the full economic cost of big power outages can be nearly impossible to calculate, the Department of Energy has calculated U.S. commerce loses $150 billion annually from power failures. A lot of people mistakenly think EVs are the problem that will create issues for the power grid, Hester said, noting that California provides a good example.

Construction equipment marketplace raises a $17.5M Series A led by Beringea • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Commerce, construction, Hardware, StartupsNo Comments

Back in 2020 I covered how the UK startup Yardlink – which allows construction companies to obtain critical equipment faster than normal equipment rental companies – had raised it’s Seed round. It was basically bringing a digital-first, marketplace approach to an industry normal hide-bound by a slow, centralized hire market. Two years later, and Yardlink is back with a $17.5m Series A funding round led by Beringea, with participation from Amplifier, and existing investors Speedinvest and FJ Labs. From its rental roots, the company has now matured into a full-service supply chain management platform, meaning contractors get access to suppliers of tools, equipment, bulk materials, fuel, waste management and other services and materials. All can be sourced, booked, and paid for via the platform. As YardLink CEO, Neeral Shah said in a statement: “Construction is one of the least digitized industries with over 95% of supply chain transactions still being conducted over the phone, email and pen and paper… YardLink connects construction customers with their supply chain on a single digital platform.” Commenting, Maria Wagner, Partner at Beringea added: “YardLink has the potential to establish itself as the go-to marketplace for construction supplies.” Over email, the company also told me that the locality of its supply chain is helping to minimize the carbon footprint of construction projects. Shah provided trade financing for construction procurement for years, but spotted a gap in the market and launched YardLink in 2018. It now claims to have 3000+ customers.

Funding in Indian startups shrinks by more than half • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Startups, VentureNo Comments

We are getting a more realistic update on the startup funding landscape in India, and as is true elsewhere, all the figures are in red in the South Asian market. Indian startups raised $3 billion in the quarter that ended in September, down 57% from the previous quarter and 80% year-over-year, market intelligence platform Tracxn said in a report Tuesday. The figures are remarkable for many reasons, the most obvious being that startups are finding it difficult to raise capital at a time when most top tier funds in India — Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Elevation Capital, Matrix Partners India — have raised record large funds this year. In Q3, the Indian startup ecosystem undertook 334 funding rounds, down from 674 in Q3 2021. The check sizes are also increasingly getting smaller for startups across all funding stages. Late stage startups that raised capital secured $42 million in funding on an average, down over 70% from $142 million during the same period last year, Tracxn said. Investors globally have become cautious in recent months as market reverses most of the gains from the 13-year-long bull cycle. As a result, startups are increasingly finding it difficult to raise new rounds of funding at a valuation higher than that of the previous round. Due diligence, which largely went out of fashion last year, has made a strong return as most deals are taking weeks, if not longer, for evaluation. Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank, which deployed over $3 billion in India last year, warned in August that the funding winter may continue for longer because some unicorn founders are unwilling to accept lower valuations. It doesn’t appear that things will be improving anytime soon. Byju’s, India’s most valuable startup, has postponed its plans to file to go public this year. Budget hotel chain Oyo, once valued at $10 billion, is looking to list early next year but its largest backer has cut its valuation to $2.7 billion. “India is currently experiencing a funding slowdown which is expected to continue for the next 12-18 months and the effects of the funding slowdown are expected to intensify going forward,” said Neha Singh, co-founder of Tracxn, which on a separate note has just filed for an IPO. Some charts and other interesting stats from the report:

YouTube to broadly support the @username format with launch of YouTube handles • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Apps, Creators, Media & Entertainment, YouTube, YouTube ShortsNo Comments

YouTube is making it easier for creators to direct viewers to their channels. The company today announced “handles,” a new way for creators to identify their channel with an @username format in order to interact with their viewers across YouTube Shorts, channel pages, in video descriptions, in comments and more. These handles will be made available to everyone on YouTube — you don’t need to be a creator of a certain size or subscriber count to claim your own unique @handle, YouTube says. Handles and @usernames are common across social media, including on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram and others. But YouTube had only offered limited support for the format — allowing creators to mention channels in video titles and descriptions with the @ symbol, or mention other users in YouTube Live chats, for example. But the @username option was not available in other areas and discussions. Instead, you’d have to reply to another YouTube user’s comment in order to tag them. With YouTube’s expansion into TikTok’s territory with YouTube Shorts, however, the company now wants to more closely mimic the way the ByteDance-owned video app encourages users to engage in back-and-forth discussions through their short videos and in the resulting discussions and video responses that come about. To work, that requires the use of @usernames — or @handles as YouTube calls them. YouTube says the new handles will appear on both channel pages and Shorts, making them “instantly and consistently recognizable” across the platform. After handles are fully launched, users will be able to @mention others in the comments, community posts, video descriptions and elsewhere. While these handles won’t replace the channel name itself, they will be unique across YouTube, allowing creators to establish a distinct presence for themselves on the platform. Support for handles will begin to roll out gradually, starting later next week. To protect creators from having their channel name staked by someone else in what’s sure to be one of the biggest username landgrabs on the internet, YouTube notes that channels that already have a personalized URL will see that becoming their default handle unless they choose to change it. The company also indicated that the timing of the rollout of handles has been designed in a way to ensure that established creators will gain access to the feature first, as YouTube plans to utilize factors — like the creator’s overall YouTube presence, subscriber count and whether the channel is active or inactive — when determining when to offer a creator the ability to set up their own handle. After a handle is established, YouTube will additionally create a matching URL in the format of youtube.com/@handle, which would allow the creator to market their handle elsewhere on the web or in other media. And if the channel already had a personalized URL it was using for a similar purpose, they won’t need to update their links — that URL will automatically redirect to the new handle-based URL instead. Everyone on YouTube will be able to grab a handle for themselves at some point. YouTube says creators should look for a notification to arrive over the next month.

Fears of climate tech underinvestment are probably overblown • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Climate, climate tech, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, investment, VentureNo Comments

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over whether the world will get its act together enough to prevent catastrophic warming. There’s certainly a case to be made there — we’ve spent the last several decades kicking the can down the road at every opportunity. Well, here we are again, with the can again before us and the end of the road fast approaching. Lucky for me, I tend to be an optimist. I still think we’re in for a world of pain, and we’ll probably have to rely on some exotic technologies like fusion power and direct air capture to pull ourselves back from the brink. But in my opinion, when the chips are down, humanity tends to pull through. If we use computing and software as a guide, we should expect to see a nearly fivefold increase in the capital committed in the next 30 years. That is why I think many of the gloom-and-doom scenarios regarding climate tech investments tend to be overly bearish. Take the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) forecasts, which for years habitually underestimated the growth of solar power. The agency has since added better models to its toolkit, but it and others still make predictions that go on to be proven overly pessimistic. In reality, renewable energy and other climate tech is likely to follow an adoption curve that’s similar to other industries. It might even follow an accelerated version given how broad and deep the impacts and benefits of climate tech are likely to be — and the very real prospect of Armageddon if we do nothing. To see how climate tech stands to outperform today’s forecasts, you only have to look as far back as 1970, when the computing revolution was beginning. Exponential trends The overarching trend of investment in the computing and telecommunications space over 50 years has been exponential. But that simplistic analysis papers over the significant growth that happened in the early years. It also fails to pick up on key technological advances that sparked wider adoption.

Brands are spamming WhatsApp users in India, Facebook’s largest market • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Apps, Facebook, india, Social, WhatsAppNo Comments

As Meta makes deeper inroads with businesses on WhatsApp, its biggest bet to monetize the instant messaging app with over 2 billion users, we are getting an early glimpse at how user experience might change on the free app. It’s not great. Scores of people in India, WhatsApp’s largest market by users with over 500 million accounts, have complained about getting too many spam texts from businesses in recent months. WhatsApp, which quickly displaced the SMS app in the country by offering free texts, is increasingly looking like that SMS app, users say. Thousands of brands in India have signed up for WhatsApp, consistently succeeding in reaching eyeballs of more than 80% users, a person familiar with the matter said, a figure miles ahead of campaigns run on emails and traditional texts. What’s more annoying is that even after users have blocked some businesses, many return to the inbox from different phone numbers, according to author’s account. WhatsApp for business is fast becoming WhatsApp for spam. 🙄 Blocking a couple of accounts every day, these days. PR agencies are also now spamming on WhatsApp. pic.twitter.com/dvgbqx7cz8 — Nikhil Pahwa (@nixxin) September 15, 2022 WhatsApp is the new spam machine, it has become what it intended to solve with SMS. Ola / Uber services are no where close to what they were to replace… taxi / cabs. Every domain, brings up an opportunity to innovate every few years. — pj (@BeingPractical) June 27, 2022 In many ways, the issue doesn’t come as a surprise. Google offered businesses in India the ability to use RCS to supercharge their communication with customers in the country, the company’s biggest market by users. Rich Communication Services, or RCS, is the collective effort of a number of industry players to supercharge the traditional SMS with modern features such as richer texts and end-to-end encryption. The company had to halt the service in the country after some businesses started to abuse the company’s anti-spam policies to send promotional messages to users in India. Read more about WhatsApp’s rampant spam issue on Rest of the World. A Meta spokesperson offered the following comment: “Messaging is the new way to get business done, better than an e-mail or phone call. Our rule is that people always need to request to receive updates before a business can message them, and we empower people with easy ways to block a business or report a problem at any time. We constantly work with businesses to ensure messages are helpful and expected, and we have limits on the number of messages they can send per day. Getting this right is important for us as well as the businesses and most importantly the people we serve.” Updated, 10/10/22, 5:30 PM ET with Meta comment.