Apps

Apple pauses gambling ads on App Store product pages after developer outcry • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in app-store, Apple, Apps, GamblingNo Comments

It’s hard to imagine anyone but advertisers being happy with Apple for putting more ads on the page in App Store listings, but the way they rolled it out was especially troubling. Ads for shady gambling apps quickly pervaded the platform, appearing in the “you might also like” section of ordinary apps — including at least one for gambling addiction management. The change took place earlier this week and the problem was almost immediately discovered by developers, who naturally check their product page frequently to make sure all is well. For a brief but significant period — Tuesday night, basically — many of these newly created ad spaces were filled with “online casinos” and sports or horse betting apps. Now gambling is already a controversial topic on the App Store, as it’s hard to think of a category more predatory on users, while Apple siphons up a share of the cash being won and lost. The practice is highly regulated or completely illegal in plenty of countries or locales, so advertising it ought to be carefully monitored. So that it is being given pole position on Apple’s platform to begin with is a little unpleasant. But these are not just a way for someone to skip a trip to the bookie; many were shady shovelware and definitely not something that established developers would want to associate with at all. Yet suddenly at the bottom of their game or app’s page, there it was: “you might also like” a janky virtual casino. As a user, if I saw that, I would definitely wonder whether the app I was looking at was in the same category. The most egregious example has to be the ad for “Jackpot World,” a slots app, in the ad slot for RecoverMe, a gambling addiction support app. Imagine if you got an ad for meth when you tried to search for a rehab center! What’s this? Ads for gambling at the bottom of a listing for a gambling addiction recovery app. How could this possibly go wrong? #Apple #appstore pic.twitter.com/9MQQvDMx8r — ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ Jon (@hot_doggin_jon) October 26, 2022 Fortunately, Apple was watching the conflagration on Twitter and elsewhere and yesterday it restricted gambling ads “and a few other categories” from these slots. Of course that’s not the end of the drama. An ad being inappropriate for its position is not an easy call to make, and even in the best case scenario developers feel that they are essentially being taxed, since if they don’t buy the ad on their own app, their competitor might. Apple has made it clear that it intends to bolster its advertising revenue, despite the company’s status as one of the richest and most profitable in the world. Old hands at the ad game, like Google, have weathered controversies like this one before, but Apple probably has a few more hard knocks ahead of it in its push for greater cash flow.

Telegram announces username auctions on TON blockchain • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apps, blockchain, Crypto, NFTs, Pavel Durov, TelegramNo Comments

Telegram announced today that will it hold an auction for usernames — for both individual accounts and channels — through a marketplace built on top of the TON blockchain. In August, Telegram founder Pavel Durov first mentioned the idea by noting the possibility of adding “a little bit of Web 3.0 to Telegram in the coming weeks.” At that time, he said he was impressed by the success of the TON Foundation’s auction of domain names. “I’m really impressed by the success of the auction TON recently conducted for their domain/wallet names. Wallet.ton was sold for 215,250 Toncoin (~$260000) while casino.ton was sold for ~$244000. If TON has been able to achieve these results, imagine how successful Telegram with its 700 million users could be if we put reserved @ usernames, group and channel links for auction,” he said. Now the company is putting this plan into action. Telegram and TON Foundation are using a separate website Fragment.com as a hub for these auctions. Users will be able to log into the site using Telegram, the tonkeeper app, or their TON-based wallets. The website will also help users link their Telegram accounts to the handles that they have bought. At launch, the chat app is auctioning four and five-character handles that will be available for everyone. Telegram users can also put up their own existing handles for auction. Each handle put up for auction will end in a week with an extra hour for final bidding. The company is setting a minimum auction value for four character handles at 10,000 toncoins — which converts to roughly $18,400 at the time of writing. “As the partnership between TON and Telegram deepens, the synergy between the two projects will enable the continuedcreation of tangible use-cases of blockchain technology. For the first time, social media users will be able to transparently prove that they own their handles thanks to their tokenisation on the TON blockchain,” Andrew Rogozov, Founding Member of the TON Foundation said in a statement Telegram had big ambitions in the web3 world but it had to ditch those ambitions. In 2018, the company hatched up plans for Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain project and an initial coin offering (ICO). The project got backing from big-name investors including Benchmark and Lightspeed Capital, which put up $1.7 billion. However, after a legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Telegram was forced to forsake the project. After Telegram stopped working on TON, various independent groups continued the development with Toncoin getting backing from Durov and winning the rights to ton.org website in 2021. But the Telegram founder has tried to distance himself from direct involvement with the project. Telegram has been trying various methods to earn money to keep the company sustainable. Last year it introduced ad spots on public channels. Earlier this year, the company introduced a paid plan that allows large file transfers, exclusive stickers and reactions, and the ability to convert voice messages into text. The new announcement of username auction on the blockchain is another step to get some more moolah in the bank.

AWS makes Neptune, its graph database service, serverless • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Apps, AWS, Enterprise, neptuneNo Comments

Nearly five years ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Neptune, a service for running apps that need a graph database to store and query connected data sets. Now, to keep up with the serverless trend, AWS is expanding the offering with Amazon Neptune Serverless, a serverless option for Neptune that automatically scales to support variable graph database workloads. Unlike traditional databases, graph databases store nodes and relationships instead of tables, columns and documents. Developers building apps that track relationships among connected data points use graph databases to understand those relationships within the full data set; graph database use cases include contact tracing, fraud detection, drug discovery and even network security. Graph databases are powerful, to be sure. But they’re also unpredictable in terms of processing overhead. Typically, graph databases require a dev team to continuously monitor and reconfigure compute capacity to maintain good performance. Amazon Neptune Serverless ostensibly solves this problem by autonomously provisioning, scaling and managing clusters of graph database instances. Neptune Serverless supports the same graph query languages as Amazon Neptune, and customers only pay for the apps they use, according to AWS VP of databases, analytics and machine learning Swami Sivasubramanian. “Customers have asked us to take care of the heavy lifting associated with managing capacity and optimizing for cost and performance,” Sivasubramanian said in a press release. “Now, with Amazon Neptune Serverless, customers have a graph database that automatically provisions and seamlessly scales clusters to provide just the right amount of capacity to meet demand.” Neptune Serverless is generally available as of today today to AWS customers running Neptune in the U.S. East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Ireland) and Europe (London) server regions. Amazon says it’ll come to additional regions in the future. Serverless computing, which abstracts away the complexities of managing server capacity, is a growing trend in software development. According to one 2020 survey, 50% of AWS users said that they were using some degree of serverless capabilities. And CB Insights estimated the market for serverless was worth $7.7 billion in 2021, up from $1.9 billion in 2016. AWS last majorly expanded its serverless product portfolio in April, when it launched Amazon Aurora Serverless V2, its serverless database service, and SageMaker Serverless Inference, a solution for running AI systems that doesn’t require configuring the underlying infrastructure. July saw the release of several new serverless analytics offerings, including Amazon EMR, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka and Amazon Redshift.

Elon Musk tells advertisers that Twitter cannot become “a free-for-all hellscape” • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apps, Elon Musk, TwitterNo Comments

Elon Musk published a note addressed to Twitter advertisers on his account this morning, the day before his court-ordered deadline to close his $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform. In the short address, Musk — who is currently in San Francisco and spending the week at Twitter HQ — explains to Twitter advertisers why he is motivated to buy the platform. “There has been much speculation about why I bought Twitter and what I think about advertising,” Musk wrote. “Most of it has been wrong.” Musk repeated some of the primary talking points that he has been stating since he first announced the acquisition in April. He believes in Twitter’s potential as a “common digital town square,” but he is worried that “social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers” as traditional media continues toward its “relentless pursuit of clicks.” “That is why I bought Twitter. I didn’t do it because it would be easy. I didn’t to it to make more money,” he explained. “I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.” None of these declarations are particularly illuminating — Musk said in April that he “doesn’t care about the economics” of buying Twitter. Spending $44 billion on a struggling business isn’t the greatest business move, but it’s something that you can accomplish out of a sense of warped obligation to humanity when you are the richest guy on the planet (and eventually on our neighboring red planet too, probably). But Musk actually slipped in something here that is mildly reassuring, though it’s generally a challenge to take him at his word. Musk has continually touted the importance of free speech in his acquisition of Twitter, even mentioning it in his letter to the company board when he first announced his intent to acquire the platform. “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk wrote in April. “However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.” “… Twitter has extraordinary potential,” he added. “I will unlock it.” Yet Twitter’s existing content guidelines aren’t as stringent as his declarations would lead you to believe. Beyond prohibiting illegal activity, the platform bans hateful conduct (attacking or threatening people based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, etc.), depictions of graphic violence, promotion of suicide or self-harm, etc. The platform doesn’t even censor pornographic content, so long as it doesn’t appear in a live video or a profile header. In today’s letter, though, Musk seems to be somewhat aware of the fact that “anything goes!” is a content moderation policy that’s doomed to fail. “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” he wrote. “In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences, just as you can choose, for example, to see movies or play video games ranging from all ages to mature.” It’s unclear how he plans to make Twitter “warm and welcoming,” though, without flouting content guidelines that aim to protect the most vulnerable users on the platform. He ends the letter by telling advertisers that Twitter aspires to “be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.” Finally, I have to take a cheap shot… Musk did not use alt text when posting these three text-heavy screenshots of his letter to advertisers this morning. To be fair, most people I follow don’t regularly use alt text (but they should!), so this is a good chance to call our presumptive bird app overlord in. Hey, Elon! If you really want Twitter to be a public town square, you should use alt text to make sure that people with vision-related disabilities can engage in the conversation too!

Integration platform Cinchy lands fresh cash to connect data sources • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apps, data integration, Enterprise, funding, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Cinchy, a startup that provides a data management service for enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $14.5 million in Series B funding led by Forgepoint Capital with participation from IVP, SUV, Techstars and Mars. Bringing the company’s total raised to $24 million, the capital will be put toward scaling Cinchy’s outreach and continuing to invest in the startup’s core technology, CEO Dan DeMers told ZebethMedia in an interview. “Data management remains an expensive chore, and a proliferation of apps producing an ever-increasing volume of data only adds to the challenge. As a result, rather than being a business driver or competitive advantage, data is more often a drain on IT budgets and a nightmare for compliance teams,” DeMers said. “The Cinchy platform addresses many of the challenges associated with today’s IT environments, specifically those defined by data silos, data copies and complex code.” DeMers co-founded Cinchy with Karanjot Jaswal in 2017 with the ambitious goal of abstracting away data integration processes. DeMers was previously the director of prime finance and futures technology at Citi, where he built and managed a tech delivery and support services group for brokerage. Jaswal was also at Citi, working on the data warehouse team on risk and margin. Both DeMers and Jasawal perceived that companies were struggling to overcome data integration hurdles. To their point, in a recent IBM survey, 40% of IT leaders said their data integrations are getting too expensive while 19% believe their current data integration solutions can’t handle all data sources. “The existing app- and API-centric architecture requires individual apps to manage their own data, and this means every new app or API adds yet another data silo,” DeMers said. “It’s like a tax on innovation that only gets worse with every new solution that’s delivered.” Cinchy aims to solve this by enabling organizations to decouple data from apps and other silos by connecting them to a “network-based” platform. Project teams first connect data from core systems, software-as-a-service apps and spreadsheets to the platform — Cinchy handles things like data backup, data versioning and data engagement tracking without actually hosting the data. Admins can access the platform to view, edit or query data for individuals and teams. Other users with the right permissions can engage with the data to build data models. Image Credits: Cinchy Cinchy uses the platform itself to run its business. Employees have self-serve access to discover, query, create and change data, DeMers says. Changes to data are version-controlled, access-controlled and available to apps and users based on granular controls. “Anyone who’s experienced the collaboration and efficiency of collaboration tools like Google Drive and Docs will understand the significance of bringing those capabilities to organizational data,” DeMers said. “The outcomes in terms of speed, efficiency, control and creative problem-solving are staggering.” DeMers sees Cinchy competing with any vendor that promises to simplify data integration. There’s a fair number out there, including Equalum, Airbyte, Hevo Data and Jitsu — all chasing after a market that could be worth $22.28 billion by 2027. Demand for data integrations solutions certainly appears high, with a 2020 survey from Dresner Advisory Services finding that 67% of enterprises were relying on data integration to support analytics and business intelligence platforms and that 24% were planning to in the next 12 months. But DeMers argues that most are focused on workarounds to better deal with data fragmentation, particularly in the context of analytics. “Most products that may be seen to be competing with Cinchy are in fact only exacerbating the challenges to agility and compliance associated with data integration,” he said. Rivals no doubt disagree. It’s true, though, that Cinchy has a growing customer base, particularly in the financial industry — suggesting that it’s winning over businesses. Adopters span institutions like TD Bank, National Bank and Natixis; Cinchy recently launched a credit union edition of the platform to better serve financial institutions. “Organizations everywhere are looking for ways to save money while continuing to capitalize on market opportunities with new solutions. This is why we’re confident that the Cinchy platform will increasingly appeal to chief experience officers and team leaders tasked with bridging these priorities,” DeMers said. “Cinchy … enables organizations to liberate their data from applications, spreadsheets, and other silos and make it [available] for real-time collaboration whenever and wherever it’s needed.” Toronto-based Cinchy, which has just over 50 employees, is currently hiring.

YouTube opens up certification program for health-related channels • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apps, Biotech & Health, certification, Health, misinformation, YouTubeNo Comments

YouTube announced today that it will certify channels of licensed health professionals like doctors, nurses, or therapists who produce health-related content. Last year, the company introduced a label noting that the info on the channel is from a certified healthcare professional. Plus, it showed videos from these approved channels in a new carousel called “From health sources” that shows up atop search results. While these features were available to select institutions like educational institutions, public health departments, hospitals, and government entities at launch, the company is now expanding the program and inviting U.S-based health creators to apply for this program. Image Credits: YouTube YouTube follows guidelines set by the Council of Medical Specialty Societies, the National Academy of Medicine and the World Health Organization to build a framework around credible sources for health-related content on the platform. All institutions and health-related creators need to follow these rules while making videos on YouTube. The streaming platform has set a bunch of requirements for creators applying for this certification: they should primarily have health content on the channel; they must have more than 2,000 watch hours of public videos in the last 12 months; and they must attest that they are a licensed doctor, nurse or mental health professional. YouTube will review the channel against its guidelines and it will also check with authorities to verify that applicants have a valid medical license. Once the channels are approved, they will get a special label noting them as “a licensed healthcare professional” resource, and their videos will also surface on health content shelves on top of related search results. YouTube said that this covers search results in most conditions apart from rare diseases (it didn’t specify which ones). The caveat is that if a creator makes a video that’s not directly related to healthcare, the channel still retains the label and the video might also show up on the health content shelf if the creator uses keywords related to a medical condition. In a call with ZebethMedia, Dr. Garth Graham, Global Head of YouTube Health, said that the onus of making health-related videos lies on the creator. However, the company doesn’t provide any toggle if they want to demark an unrelated video. Notably, YouTube launched a program last month that surfaces personal stories from patients or their relatives in a separate panel when users search for ailments cancer, and mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. But there is a chance that a health creator’s personal story might show up in the health resources panel rather than the personal stories panel. Image Credits: YouTube There is also a concern about certified health-related channels spreading misinformation. Dr. Graham insisted that the company uses a combination of processes (AI) and people (reviewers) to measure them against YouTube’s guidelines. “If a channel that is eligible for these features receives a Community Guidelines strike or has content removed for violating our policies, they will lose their eligibility. Channels can reapply in 90 days if the Community Guidelines issues have been resolved. This is similar to how our YouTube Partner Program works, which many creators are familiar with,” he said. The company also reviews these channels annually to ensure that it is following YouTube’s rules for health-related content and remove them from the program if necessary. Apart from the U.S., YouTube is also opening up the application process for healthcare institutions and individuals in Germany. Users in that region will start seeing healthcare certification labels and the health content carousel early next year once the first set of channels is approved.

Devtron raises fresh capital for its cloud DevOps platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apps, Dev, devops, Enterprise, funding, Insight Partners, StartupsNo Comments

The cloud-native market has seen the introduction of a range of open source DevOps tools — tools that combine software development and IT operations — built to address very specific use cases. As a result, DevOps teams today have too many narrow choices that don’t work together seamlessly or that can’t be integrated into a single platform. At least, that’s the opinion of Prashant Ghildiyal, one of the co-founders of Devtron, a startup offering a platform to address what he believes are the top challenges facing the DevOps space. A container management system, Devtron offers a low-code delivery platform optimized for Kubernetes. (“Containers” are packages of software that contain the necessary elements to run in any environment.) The platform handles app management, security and more, providing an interface that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure. To Ghildiyal’s point, there’s evidence to suggest that there’s a gap between DevOps adoption and success. In a 2019 Harvard Business Review survey, only 10% of developers said that their companies were successful at building and deploying software quickly, with less than half (48%) saying their organization always relies on DevOps methodologies. A separate, more recent poll by infrastructure automation company Puppet found that companies were hitting a number of DevOps speed bumps in the race to be cloud native, including a skills shortage, issues with legacy architecture, organizational resistance to change and limited or lack of automation. Investors are keen on Devtron, as evidenced by the company today closing a $12 million funding round led by Insight Partners. “Devtron integrates with products across the lifecycle of microservices, and in particular Kubernetes, enabling its users to deploy faster and automate their CI/CD pipelines without worrying about Kubernetes knowhow,” Insight Partners principal Josh Zelman told ZebethMedia via email. Ghildiyal says that he and Devtron’s other co-founders, Nishant Kumar and Rajesh Razdan, experienced the challenges of scaling DevOps firsthand in their previous roles as heads of technology and software architects at various startups. Their experiences informed Devtron’s design, which Ghildiyal describes as “DevOps in a box,” with tools that provide audit logs and metrics showing the state of an organization’s DevOps maturity. Devtron also provides tools for access controls and policy management, as well as environment orchestration, software delivery workflow and cost. “This saves significant time and resources to build and deploy in production,” Zelman added. Ghildiyal sees Devtron competing against formidable incumbent vendors like GitLab and Harness in a DevOps market that was worth an estimated $4 billion in 2020, according to Global Market Insights. (That’s not to mention startups like Render, which raised $20 million last November after winning our Disrupt SF 2019 Startup Battlefield.) When asked about clients, Ghildiyal said Devtron has “several” unicorns and growth-stage companies as commercial customers, but he declined to reveal names — or Devtron’s revenue. Ghildiyal said that India-based Devtron’s principal focuses post-fundraise will be resources and cost optimizations to “enable DevOps automation and efficiency at scale.”

Unito, a platform for managing SaaS apps, raises $30M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apps, Enterprise, funding, SaaS, software as a service, startup, Startups, UnitoNo Comments

Unito, a startup offering a service to bring together disparate software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms — for example, Jira and Trello — today announced it raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by CDPQ’s Equity 253 fund with participation from Rainfall Ventures, Investissement Québec, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tom Williams and Mistral Venture Partners. The new cash brings the company’s total raised to $33 million, which CEO Marc Boscher says is being put toward product development and expanding Unito’s headcount from 65 people to 70 by the end of the year. SaaS tool usage is on the rise, with corporate teams now using 40 to 60 tools on average; a 2019 report from Blissfully found companies were spending around $343,000 per year on SaaS. But while SaaS apps have become the lifeblood of organizations, they can often be unwieldy. In a 2021 survey, enterprise architecture startup LeanIX found that businesses rarely have common standards when it comes to responsibility for SaaS management. On a mission to uncover a solution — or invent a new one — Boscher and Eryk Warren joined Montreal’s Founder Institute program in 2015. Boscher hails from the IT industry, while Warren has software engineering experience, having worked at startups in Montreal, including events ticketing system Outbox Technology and Fluential. Boscher and Warren founded Unito that same year, in late 2015, as they finally arrived at a way to help companies manage SaaS sprawl. Rather than build a new project management or collaboration platform, the two co-founders created two-way integrations with automatic syncing between existing SaaS tools. “The massive proliferation of online tools is causing nearly as many headaches as it solves,” Boscher told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “[T]ools made for collaboration can actually hinder collaboration, as they become virtual information silos … There are more SaaS tools than ever before and remote work is forcing companies to adopt these digital solutions, which leads to fragmentation and less control over tools as people work from anywhere on any device.” Configuring workflows using Unito’s cloud platform. Image Credits: Unito Unito attempts to ease this fragmentation by letting IT teams choose which apps they wish to connect — supported apps include GitLab, HubSpot, Google Sheets, ClickUp, Salesforce and Wrike — and authorize the Unito service to access them. Users with admin access can then map how other users, lists, custom fields and more travel among and leverage the various connected tools. On the back end, Unito provides analytics, including usage statistics and executive reporting for IT resource planning. The platform also acts as a secure gateway, limiting access to SaaS apps to only authorized users. Boscher argues that Unito can even save companies money by reducing seat requirements and “optimizing” software licensing. “Two-way syncing means developers can stay in their software development tools, and business teams in their project management tools — no doubling up on licenses to allow collaboration,” he added. “Eliminating hours of manual copying and pasting and always having the right information in your tools is key for agile and high-velocity teams.” True or not, many vendors claim to achieve this with their own tools for SaaS app management. Beamy recently raised $9 million to further develop its platform to detect and orchestrate SaaS apps. Torri, which is also venture backed, aims to bring businesses together around the cloud apps they use so they can discover all the apps they have — and automatically take action on those most appropriate for return on investment. Those are just the tip of the SaaS management iceberg — see BetterCloud, Lumos and Paragon for other examples. But Boscher believes there’s breathing room yet in the budding market. He points to findings from Gartner, which suggest 50% of organizations using multiple SaaS apps will centralize orchestration and usage of these apps using a SaaS management platform — an increase from less than 20% in 2021. “Unito’s competitors include integration software-as-a-service players like Zapier and its copycats, which boast thousands of easy to use but shallow one-way connectors, and integration platform-as-a-service players like Workato and Tray.io, which offer deeper one-way integrations but are difficult to use and need professional services and/or developers for implementation,” Boscher said, touting the ostensible advantages of Unito’s two-way syncing tech. “Unito’s two-way sync provides users with the most recent data from any work app and shares it in real-time based on customized fields and rules set by the user.” Boscher claims Unito has more than 50,000 users across 7,000 companies, including Atlassian, Corpay, Teamwork, the Cincinnati Reds and Wrike, with workflows in IT, project management, sales, spreadsheets and the software development domains. This year alone, Unito’s inbound monthly sign-ups doubled in six months, he says. And while Boscher wouldn’t reveal revenue, he noted that Unito is still hiring. “Having taken startups through two recessions before, Unito founders are taking hiring slow and keeping the bar high … Unito has always kept burn in line with growth,” Boscher said. “Unito aims to become the universal translator for enterprises by letting any team or department set up deep integrations on their own, while keeping IT in control at the governance and security level.”

Needl wants to become the search engine for your accounts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apps, productivity, Search, Startups, Y CombinatorNo Comments

Google, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines help you find information from the web. But it’s hard to find documents, messages, meetings, and emails from your own accounts. You need to go to different applications to find things that might be related to one project. A Y-Combinator-backed app called Needl is helping users with that. Needl is a cross-platform application that lets you search across your local filesystem and accounts like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Notion, and Slack. The free version — available on the web, Windows, and Mac — lets you connect a single account per integration. If you need more account connections and integrations like Jira and Linear, you will need to pay $10 per month. The application is simple to set up and use: once you install it on your system, it will ask you to connect your Google, Slack, and Notion accounts. Once that’s done, you can search for files, events, emails, and other things across all these accounts and your local filesystem. You can filter these results by files, messages, events, tasks, and emails. Image Credits: Needl If you’re a keyboard ninja, the app has handy shortcuts for you to launch the interface and navigate around. Users can customize shortcuts to launch the app and jump to the home view. The default view on the app shows the Activity Feed, which will show you contextual information on different apps such as your upcoming meeting. Needl founders Max Keenan, Angela Liu, and James Liu are all Chicago university alums and met at a hackathon. They worked on a few side projects like a tool to write essays using GPT-2 and a TikTok for blog posts. After university, MaxKeenan in investment banking at Moelis while Angela Liu and James Liu joined Microsoft. The trio said that they had to become organized once they joined their jobs and meticulously follow naming systems and folder structures to easily find info. They wanted to solve this problem of constantly and manually reorganizing information through search. “We were looking for a problem that historically had never been solved, but improvements in language models would be able to solve. As we were onboarding virtually during the pandemic, it hit us right in the face — information was siloed across all of these different platforms and we could improve the search and discovery of info,” Keenan said in an email conversation with ZebethMedia. Image Credits: Needl Needl team wrote the first line of code in June when it was in the Y-combinator’s summer 2022 cohort. The company has raised $2.5 million from various investors including Fuse, Y Combinator, Palm Drive Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Collin Wallace and Nathan Wenzel. The company rolled out the product under a closed beta to around 200 users in August. Now the company is making it available to everyone under public beta. Keenan said the company wants to focus on improving its contextual and semantic search through large language models (LLM) over the next 12 months. Plus, the startup wants to add more premium integrations like Asana, Hubspot, and Salesforce. The startup considers Glean, a startup powering enterprise search across apps, as one of its major competitors. In May, Glean raised $100 million in its series C funding round led by Sequoia with participation from Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, and the Slack Fund at a $1 billion valuation post-money. Keenan said that a major differentiation between Glean and Needl is the shorter setup time for the latter. “Biggest difference from Glean is that our product is self-serve and can be set up in under 2 mins by anyone, regardless of company size. Glean sells through sales-led processes that require full company adoption, can take months, and are inaccessible to individuals or small teams,” he said. Neeva, a search engine built by a former Google ad exec, also offers search features through app integrations. However, it is available only in the U.S. with European expansion underway. Keenan said in long term, Needl wants to pre-empt the need for search and present information through its own recommendation engine.