“How AI is enabling the intelligent enterprise” plus 29 more VentureBeat

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• How AI is enabling the intelligent enterprise
• Mark Zuckerberg suing Hawaiian land owners in bid to further seclude Kauai property
• Netflix nears 94 million subscribers 10 years after streaming launch
• Resident Evil 7 gets Play Anywhere support for Xbox One and PC
• Exploration-based puzzle game Solo seeks funding on Fig
• How WeChat bots are running amok
• Genvid releases interactive streaming for esports broadcasts
• Clash of Clans maker Supercell hacked; 1 million accounts compromised
• Pokémon Go fights poverty with 17 PokéStops at the World Economic Forum
• Twitter sells Fabric mobile developer platform to Google
• Slack introduces threaded replies
• Former Techland COO starts a new game studio in Poland
• Mozilla unveils new logo, font, and design
• Microsoft’s LinkedIn open-sources Bluepill for testing iOS apps
• Microsoft will double its AI R&D group in Montreal
• PAX South will host NGE’s Overwatch Winter Premiere Live Finals
• Sensor Tower: Q4 game revenues grew 70%, downloads up 33%
• Vimeo rolls out tools that let reviewers provide time-coded feedback and notes on individual frames
• DocuSign hires former Responsys head Daniel Springer as its new CEO
• Voyager Capital selects IVP’s James Newell as new partner
• Proof lands $2 million to explain the cause and effect of your marketing spend
• Joonko’s newest product aims to remove unconscious bias at work
• Football legend Joe Montana invests $250,000 in Blend’s Genie bots
• OpenView Invests $25M Series A in Deputy to Redefine Workforce Management
• Sales CRM startup Pipedrive raises $17 million from Atomico and others
• Smart water bottle maker Gululu partners with Generosity.org to improve drinking water sources
• MIT launches Play Labs to help AR, VR, and AI startups get off the ground
• China’s Innotech Capitals buys ad automation firm Ad-Juster
• Social Native gets authentic fans to create social media content for brands
• Seven Bridges Platform Goes Global: Now Live on AWS EU (Frankfurt) Region

How AI is enabling the intelligent enterprise Posted: 18 Jan 2017 02:10 PM PST GUEST: There has been an unprecedented, and continuing, volume of data growth worldwide. By some estimates, 90 percent of all data on the internet is unstructured text. Enterprises have an enormous opportunity to gain insights from this data, and it will become a competitive necessity to analyze it to achieve valuable and actionable insights to help shape business outcomes. In 2017, senior-level executives are increasingly looking to Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovations to help create information assets to fuel competitive advantage and transform enterprise strategy. According to the IDC Worldwide Semiannual Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide, “identifying, understanding, and acting on the use cases, technologies, and growth opportunities for cognitive/AI systems will be a differentiating factor for most enterprises and the digital disruption caused by these technologies will be significant.” However, there are two common questions that arise: Is AI technology ready to deliver value today for my enterprise? What should I focus on to drive transformation and create value? A recent research report, “Can Artificial Intelligence Deliver for Today's Enterprise?,” issued by Rage Frameworks based on data compiled by a survey of senior-level business executives, took a closer look at how artificial intelligence will be a key differentiator for businesses in 2017 and beyond. Here are some of the findings. Enabling the intelligent enterprise AI has quickly become a dominant enterprise technology as businesses strive to remain competitive. Eighty-two percent of research participants stated that their organizations would be using AI in 2017, compared to just 7 percent who said they were not expecting to use AI. The remaining 11 percent said they were strongly considering an AI deployment. To ensure the successful adoption of AI in the enterprise, however, there are several challenges that current technologies have to overcome in order to power transformational enterprise applications. AI will help enable the intelligent enterprise by automating the detailed analysis of large volumes of structured and unstructured data using a linguistics-based approach. The research indicated that the top capabilities that are important to the AI solutions the market is looking to invest in, each identified by more than half of the respondents, include reasoning and traceability (the ability to understand why your AI solution came up with the results it did), at 55 percent, and natural language understanding (your AI solution understands context and relevance), at 53 percent. Reasoning and traceability Reasoning and traceability, or having the ability to comprehend the logic behind why an AI solution reached its conclusion, is essential for widespread adoption in many enterprise-level applications. However, many current AI technologies use a computational statistics approach and are essentially “black boxes,” meaning that this visibility is not apparent. When a recommendation from the AI technology is not intuitive, there is no way of tracing it back to source. It is also unknown if it is truly causal or spurious, and users therefore must go on blind faith. For mission-critical processes such as contract review or wealth management, business users have to be able to trust that the AI engine’s reasoning is sound. Visibility of reasoning is also important in order to more easily improve the engine when there is a false positive or false negative. With a black box, the user has to find enough instances of the false positive or false negative and rebuild the engine. There is no way of knowing whether all variations or permutations of that error have been addressed or not. However, with the adoption of deep linguistic learning approaches, full and complete visibility of the reasoning can be achieved. Natural language understanding context and relevance Another challenge many modern AI technologies face is the inability to process language as humans do. This is because the majority of current AI approaches focus on natural language processing (NLP), largely driven by computational statistics that treat text as data rather than language — and use a pattern recognition technique. These methods do not attempt to understand text but instead simply transform it into data, and attempt to learn from the patterns in that data. Pattern recognition methods ultimately fail because of the inherent challenge of understanding context and relevance; context and meaning are often lost during the mechanical process of converting natural language into data. To comprehend the meaning of written text, enterprises need a word occurrence-based logic that helps the AI technology understand text using its linguistic structure. This approach — transitioning from natural language processing to natural language understanding (NLU) — involves applying computational linguistics principles to reverse engineer the text back to its fundamental ideas, and realizing how the ideas were connected together to form sentences, paragraphs, and the full document. Processing the natural language text needs to be done in the right context, which can only be developed if the technology focuses on the language structure and not just on the words in the text as most current technologies do. Understanding context is a multi­faceted challenge. First, the words in many languages can be used in multiple senses, so it is important to disambiguate word senses so their usage in a particular document can be accurately understood. Second, text documents often use domain-specific discourse models, (e.g. legal contracts, news articles, research reports, etc.). There are certain properties of such domain discourse models that should be incorporated in the AI technology in order to enhance NLU. Many words may also be used as proxies within a document. AI technology must have a way to recognize and understand proxies like “Xerox” for “copy.” In some cases, text in a document may refer to knowledge that is not explicitly part of the text. Humans can understand this with prior knowledge. AI technologies, on the other hand, have to create a repository of global knowledge that can be retrieved to supplement the document text in order to gain full understanding of its meaning. What we need The market for enterprise AI technologies is growing at an unprecedented pace. However, to ensure its successful adoption, enterprise AI applications must meet the market demand for solutions that address reasoning and traceability, as well as context and relevance through NLU, to generate the actionable insights business users need to create competitive advantage.

Mark Zuckerberg suing Hawaiian land owners in bid to further seclude Kauai property Posted: 18 Jan 2017 01:47 PM PST Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg made headlines in 2014 when he paid more than $100 million for 700 acres on Kauai, Hawaii. At the time he sought to create a sanctuary for his family, but nearly three years later, Zuckerberg wants to make it more of a secluded place so he’s suing his neighbors in an effort to grab up their land rights. According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, approximately a dozen small parcels adjacent to Zuckerberg’s property are owned by Hawaiian families with rights to “traverse the billionaire’s otherwise private domain”. But this is not just a simple lawsuit — Facebook’s CEO has taken action against a few hundred people, some of whom are deceased so it also impacts those who inherited the property. At issue is what’s known as kuleana lands which is real estate initially acquired by Hawaiian citizens through a law passed in 1850. “Often, kuleana lands automatically passed to heirs of the first owner in absence of a will or deed, and then down through subsequent generations of descendants who in some cases now own just fractions of an interest in the property without documentation,” the Star-Advertiser explained. The motive behind Zuckerberg’s action is that he wants to protect his sanctuary, which may not be dissimilar to what he did at this Palo Alto home last year and what other wealthy executives have done, such as Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. One could argue that this is done to ensure that they want to ensure their privacy, while others may think the complete opposite and just another effort to prevent people from owning land where they want to live. Zuckerberg’s three companies, Pilaa International LLC, Northshore Kalo LLC, and High Flyer LLC, filed the lawsuits at the end of December, seeking to persuade the defendants to auction their land to the highest bidder, which would likely be Zuckerberg. As a result, he’ll be able to complete his wall surrounding his massive complex on Kauai. Because some of the land being sought after has passed down from generation to generation, Zuckerberg’s team will have to do some genealogical research to find out who is the rightful owner before serving legal paperwork. Some may settle — Hawaii News Now estimates that a contested case could cost at least $200,000 — while others could attempt to wage a battle in the courtroom. In a December post, Zuckerberg explained that when he and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan visited the Hawaiian island, he “fell in love with the community and the cloudy green mountains.” The purchase was intended to help “plant roots and join the community” and they’ve dedicated themselves to preserving its beauty. The 700-acres is filled with pigs, turtles, birds, seals, and more.

Netflix nears 94 million subscribers 10 years after streaming launch Posted: 18 Jan 2017 01:27 PM PST Netflix now has 93.8 million subscribers, and its subscriber base — the most important metric for investors in this high-priced stock — grew faster than expected (up by 7.1 million) during the final quarter of 2016. Today marks the company’s tenth anniversary since launching its streaming service, Netflix notes in its earnings press release. Mail-order DVDs, the original product, now represent a small fraction of the company’s business. Netflix reported $2.48 billion in revenue and $0.15 earnings per share for the fourth 2016 quarter. Analysts expected less — about $2.47 billion in revenue (from $1.67 billion last year) and $0.14 earnings per share (from $0.10). In all, Netflix has added 14.5 million new international subscribers since Q1 2016, when it launched in 130 countries, including India and Russia, with varied (often super limited) catalogs of shows and movies. Despite strong growth last quarter, Netflix may run into problems in 2017. The company spends a lot of cash on original shows and movies (how much is too much?), it’s not growing like it used to in the U.S. (although Q4 stats look good), and new competitors could slow it down (keep your eyes on Apple). But for now Netflix’s stock is soaring above record highs — up about 8 percent. Oh, and this revenue chart looks pretty OK, too. FindTheCompany | Graphiq

Resident Evil 7 gets Play Anywhere support for Xbox One and PC Posted: 18 Jan 2017 01:24 PM PST Zombies won’t be contained by meager things like separate platforms. Microsoft announced today that Capcom’s Resident Evil 7 will be a part of its Xbox Play Anywhere program, meaning that buying a digital version of the first-person horror game for Xbox One or PC will make the game available for both platforms. Both versions will share saves, trophies, and downloadable content. Resident Evil 7 comes out on January 24 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. This could give the Xbox One version of Resident Evil 7 an edge over the PlayStation 4 one, which has the advantage of including support for PlayStation VR. Adding Xbox Play Anywhere support on Xbox One could make that version more popular for gamers who don’t have the PlayStation 4 virtual reality headset. The Resident Evil series is one of Capcom’s biggest franchises, selling 61 million copies worldwide. While the series had strayed from its horror roots for more action-based gameplay, Resident Evil 7 looks to bring back the creepiness and scares. Xbox Play Anywhere support has come with games like Gears of War 4, Forza Horizon 3, and ReCore.

Exploration-based puzzle game Solo seeks funding on Fig Posted: 18 Jan 2017 12:15 PM PST Solo, an independent game about exploration and solving puzzles, has started a crowdfunding campaign on Fig. It has a goal $64,500, which it has until February 23 to raise. Solo is aiming for an early 2018 release on PC. “Solo is a personal experience for those who enjoy puzzle and narratively creative indie games,” the game’s Fig page details. “Solo is an exploration game in which a sailor is traveling through a vast archipelago, solving puzzles, and wondering about love.” Fig has helped fund seven games, including Psychonauts 2, Wasteland 3, and Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch. Famed developers Tim Schafer of Double Fine, Brain Fargo of InXile, and Feargus Urquhart of Obsidian Entertainment started the site in 2015 as an alternative to Kickstarter that focuses exclusively on games. Another indie game, Little Bug, is seeking funding on Fig. Solo is the second game from Madrid-based indie studio Team Gotham. The Guest, its first game, was a first-person exploration game that also focused on puzzles.

How WeChat bots are running amok Posted: 18 Jan 2017 12:10 PM PST GUEST: She calls herself Cara. She looks like a model  —  large eyes, perfect skin  —  and teaches yoga for a living. She says her hometown is Changchun, a northeastern city not far from North Korea, and lives in Shanghai with her parents. Cara is also a chatbot. "She'll be a little bit flirty," Matthew Brennan, co-founder of WeChat consulting and research firm China Channel. "It doesn't feel like a bot at all." Matthew discovered Cara through a friend who found her on Momo, a Chinese dating and live streaming app. Cara's maker sent the bot's WeChat name to users she matched with on Momo, before letting it loose on the Chinese messaging app. "The whole idea is to get the hongbao," Matthew explains, using the Chinese word for red envelope, the way to gift cash on WeChat. "As soon as the hongbao's out, it's collected immediately." Over the course of a few days, Cara chats up would-be suitors in a mixture of voice and text messages, eventually asking for a small favor: a transfer of US$27. It isn't a lot  —  just enough to order something from Hong Kong, the bot says. "I'll treat you to a midnight snack in a few days," she promises in an audio message, her voice soft and pouting. "And don't get the wrong idea  —  I'm only asking you because we're friends." Black-market bots for sale Chatbots rocketed into the limelight last year, bolstered by the enthusiasm of Facebook and Microsoft, though the technology wasn't mature yet. In China, however, the response was more muted. While Facebook was busy pushing its new Messenger app  —  boasting when it hit 11,000 bots  —  Tencent, the maker of WeChat, quietly let millions of accounts develop AI-powered bots of their own, keeping a wary eye out for abuse. Accounts like Cara, for example, were shut down as Tencent wants to confine bots to customer service-related functions within brand accounts. But unsanctioned bots run amok on the social network, often tactlessly spamming groups or artificially inflating a brand’s likes and follows. The Chinese tech firm clamped down last year on thousands of accounts, denouncing the use of external software to alter WeChat. Tencent did not reply to queries about its policies on bots. Unlike WeChat’s “official” accounts, designed for commerce and media, these rogue bots hijack personal accounts. They can be purchased on Taobao, the country’s most popular online marketplace, for a couple of dollars or less. Some accounts are even “farmed” before they’re sold, which means they already have friends and have logged a certain amount of human-like activity, such as posting on Moments, WeChat’s newsfeed-like feature. “If I grow a WeChat account to 3,000 to 5,000 friends, one ad on my Moments could be worth between US$14 to US$140,” explains Li Jiarui, a Javascript and WeChat bot developer based in Beijing. “It depends on the quality of your account.” Jiarui doesn’t farm WeChat accounts, but she’s familiar with the industry. Account farming is driven by the needs of marketing and advertising agencies, as well as weishang, or “micro shops” run through personal WeChat accounts. Unlike brand accounts, personal accounts are easier to register and can participate in group chats. These shopkeepers often use their Moments to advertise all kinds of products, from imported baby powder to fake luxury handbags. “Because they often get shut down, we can learn a lot from their experience,” says Jiarui. Jiarui began developing WeChat bots about half a year ago to automate group management for her dance community on the messaging app. Her bot can automatically pull friends into groups and welcome new members, as well as hold basic conversations thanks to a Chinese natural language processing framework called Turing Robot. In fact, her chatbot is so popular that Tencent once chose it as a beta tester for WeChat. “They thought I was a serious WeChat addict,” she laughs. “They probably thought that I was on WeChat almost 24 hours a day, not doing much else. Because of my activity, they assumed I was a high-quality user.” Jiarui says her bot, which has about 3,000 friends, receives more than 10,000 messages a day. Other chatbots, like Micro Friend Assistant, are also designed to tackle WeChat’s clunky group management system. Micro Friend Assistant lets group administrators set responses to keywords, automatically upload shared files to cloud storage, or even track and analyze group activity. But, like Cara, it too was shut down. Where there’s a will, there’s a way “This Chinese New Year, I tested out a hongbao bot and then I was banned for like a week or so,” says an employee at a chatbot company, who requested anonymity. He forgot to program the bot to not be the first one to grab the red envelopes — a total bot giveaway. Adding too many friends in a short amount of time can also raise a red flag. Tencent is understandably opaque about its rules for catching bots to keep developers on their toes. But Jiarui has learned a few tricks from the app’s shopkeepers, such as using mobile data instead of Wi-Fi to send messages, as well as tying a bank card to the bot’s account. “Do your best to mimic a real account,” she advises. Chatbots should follow brand accounts, have a profile picture, post on Moments, and both proactively and passively make friends on the app. “Ideally have your friends add you first. And try to have these friends comment on the content in your Moments,” she says. This article originally appeared on Tech in Asia and blog.chatbot.com. Used with permission. Follow Tech in Asia on the web and Facebook for the latest Asian tech insights, jobs, and events.

Genvid releases interactive streaming for esports broadcasts Posted: 18 Jan 2017 12:00 PM PST Genvid Technologies has released its technology for interactive streaming of esports broadcasts. The software development kit (SDK) will enable developers to make any multiplayer game (esports titles, virtual reality games, and massively multiplayer online games) more compelling to watch on streaming services, such as YouTube. If a game developer adopts the SDK, viewers will be able to interact with the broadcast they are watching. They can change the camera angle to any angle that they like. They can mark a particular player to follow. And they can even interact with advertisements embedded in the broadcast. Jacob Navok, CEO of Genvid Technologies in New York, believes that the SDK will enable developers to create interactive broadcasts that will drive more revenue from premium esports broadcasts. Genvid has integrated supported for YouTube, Unreal Engine 4, and Amazon Web Services. "Interactive streaming — the ability to click on video as though you are in the game — is the future of the game industry," said Navok, in a statement. "Until Genvid, developers looked at viewership as a marketing tool. With our patent-pending technology, the bifurcation between players and viewers breaks down, leading to a new market of revenue opportunity through viewership and a revolution for the game industry." Using the Genvid SDK's simplified cloud launch functionality, developers and broadcasters can also generate and operate as many dynamic, interactive server-side cameras as are needed to showcase the in-game stadium. More than 25 game developers (including the world's largest publishers) and video game broadcasters participated in the company's pre-release testing program. "As an eSports broadcaster, we’re always looking for innovative technologies that push the viewing experience forward," said Andy Vander Woude, CEO of Next Generation Esports (NGE), in a statement. “Genvid’s tech makes video content clickable and interactive in a way we’ve never seen before.” The Genvid SDK maps viewer interactions onto the video itself in real time. As a result, livestreams can be monetized through transactions that are uniquely targeted to the person watching, leading to a revenue opportunity for game developers between sponsorships and in-stream purchases. "Game developers have been looking for solutions that enable meaningful participation in the streaming market," said Andy Kipling, CEO of Hardsuit Labs in Seattle, in a statement. "Genvid's technology opens new opportunities for game creators." Navok founded Genvid in 2016 with a team that included the former technical and business leadership of Square Enix Holdings Co. Ltd. subsidiary Shinra Technologies, which shut down in January 2016. Genvid is backed by March Capital Partners and OCA Ventures. The company has seven employees. Here’s Navok at CES 2017, highlighting the capabilities of the platform: And here’s an overview video from Genvid:

Clash of Clans maker Supercell hacked; 1 million accounts compromised Posted: 18 Jan 2017 11:12 AM PST Clash of Clans maker Supercell disclosed today that accounts on Supercell’s community forum have been hacked. Third-party sources say more than 1 million accounts were compromised. The company said in an official statement that the breach happened in September 2016, and that the site’s forums were affected. No game accounts were affected. Supercell makes the hit games Clash of Clans, Hay Day, Clash Royale, and Boom Beach. “We’re currently looking into report that a vulnerability allowed third party hackers to gain illegal access to some forum user information, including a number of emails and encrypted passwords,” Supercell said in its statement. “Our preliminary investigation suggests that the breach happened in September 2016 and it has since been fixed.” The company added, “We take any such breaches very seriously and we follow very strict policies when it comes to security. Please note that this breach only affects our Forum service. Game accounts have not been affected.” The company asked users to change their passwords as soon as possible. And it said “we also strongly advise you to change the password in any other systems you are using with the same login. As a general guideline, matching credentials should not be used on multiple sites.” The company also apologized. LeakBase and Motherboard came up with the 1 million user account number. Supercell didn’t say how many accounts were hacked.

Pokémon Go fights poverty with 17 PokéStops at the World Economic Forum Posted: 18 Jan 2017 10:46 AM PST Niantic and The Pokémon Company International have created 17 locations in Davos, Switzerland, to remind World Economic Forum attendees of the importance of fighting poverty. Above: New PokéStops for the World Economic Forum. Image Credit: Niantic The companies partnered with Project Everyone to raise awareness of the Global Goals for Sustainable Development at the World Economic Forum. The special PokéStops and a Gym are magnets in the real world for players who can reap rewards or fight other players at each location. In September 2015, 193 world leaders agreed to 17 Global Goals for Sustainable Development, which set out to end all forms of poverty, fight inequalities, and tackle climate change by 2030. “We’ve always wanted both Niantic and Pokémon Go to be a force for good in the world,” John Hanke, founder of Niantic, the publisher and developer of Pokémon Go said, in a statement. “We are extremely proud to partner with the Global Goals campaign to help remind people of how critically important the Goals are while hopefully keeping the world’s leaders focused on delivering on them.” Above: Pokémon Go has added new stops to raise awareness of anti-poverty goals. Image Credit: Niantic To raise awareness, Niantic is creating one new PokéStop for each of the 17 Global Goals. The Congress Centre will be turned into a Gym. Gyms are special points of interest where the three teams in the game train and ultimately battle in order to capture the Gym. From Spring 2017, additional in-game content will become available to continue to promote the importance of The Global Goals campaign. Richard Curtis, film maker, UN SDG Advocate and founder of Project Everyone said in a statement, “I believe we can be the generation to see the fantastic ambitions of the Global Goals achieved. But in order to achieve this it will require awareness, multi-sector actions and unusual and lively partnerships.” He added, “This partnership with Niantic and The Pokémon Company International with the massively popular game, Pokémon Go, is a great way of making sure the Goals are front of mind with the Davos attendees, who are such an important constituency in delivering on the promise of the Goals. And it’s excellent to be able to report back home on a partnership my sons all understand and are excited by — their generation is also so crucial to the achievement of the SDGs.” Tsunekazu Ishihara, president of The Pokémon Company said, in a statement, “With Pokémon GO, the world is our playground. And when the world is your playground, you want it to be as beautiful and safe as possible. That’s why we’re delighted to play a part in driving the awareness of the Global Goals.”

Twitter sells Fabric mobile developer platform to Google Posted: 18 Jan 2017 10:12 AM PST Twitter launched Fabric in 2014 as a means to enable developers to create better mobile apps, but fast-forward three years and the division is being sold to Google. On Wednesday, it was announced that the Fabric team and technology will be joining Google’s Developer Products Group to work with the Firebase team. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Fabric, Crashlytics, Answers, and any other related products will continue to operate as normal — the only difference is who will be maintaining them: Twitter in the short-term and Google thereafter. In a blog post, the Fabric team explained that it has a similar mission to Google: “Helping mobile teams build better apps, understand their users, and grow their businesses.” Digits does not appear to be part of the move, as developers are instructed to work with the Twitter Community forums for support. MoPub also has not been included in the deal. So Google is just getting the tools specifically geared towards developing apps, not marketing or monetizing them. According to Google’s Firebase product manager Francis Ma: “As a popular, trusted tool over many years, we expect that Crashlytics will become the main crash reporting offering for Firebase and will augment the work that we have already done in this area.” He went on to state that “the integration of Fabric is part of our larger, long-term effort of delivering a comprehensive suite of features for iOS, Android and mobile Web app development.” Fabric now reaches more than 2.5 billion active mobile devices, a 25 percent increase from April, when Twitter announced the mobile developer kit was installed on 2 billion devices. More than 580,000 mobile app developers build on top of it, up 158 percent from last February’s 225,000 number. It’s a packaged suite of tools that developers need to build their apps, including Crashlytics for app performance, MoPub for advertising, Fastlane — which Twitter acquired — for continuous deployment, and even third-party integrations such as Stripe, Amazon Web Services, and others. It’s interesting that Twitter has sold perhaps its biggest resource to developers, more than a year after chief executive Jack Dorsey apologized to the community for failing to treat them better. Following the company’s Flight conference in 2015, it embarked on a #HelloWorld campaign to hear from developers what Twitter should be doing. “We need to listen, learn, and have this conversation with you. And we want to start that today. We want you to tweet at us and tell us what you’d like to see more of, see us consider, see us change in our policy,” Dorsey said. In short, Twitter wanted a second chance with developers. The acquisition of Fabric by Google may not be well received by developers. Announcing today’s news, Dorsey reiterated his strategy for Twitter, saying that the company is focusing on the core products and business in order to ensure long-term growth. And while Fabric is no longer a part of Twitter, he emphasized that there will be continued investment in the service’s public APIs, Twitter Kit, TweetDeck, MoPub, and Gnip. You can queue up all the jokes around Google buying Twitter bit by bit, but the acquisition of Fabric appears to be a win for the Alphabet company. After all, incorporating the technology of the developer kit into helping developers build better and stronger Android apps is a plus. Unfortunately, it’s not a good sign of what’s happening to Twitter. To find out the specific terms of Fabric, Answers, Beta Tester, and Crashlytics after the acquisition’s close, click here.

Slack introduces threaded replies Posted: 18 Jan 2017 10:00 AM PST Slack has introduced a feature many users, particularly those in the media, will be ecstatic about: threaded replies. With this capability, the productivity app becomes more in line with Convo, Microsoft Teams, Facebook, and other products targeting the Future of Work space. But unlike many of these traditional apps, Slack has opted to shift these threads to the sidebar pane, removing the chatter away from the main conversation. Officially called Slack Threads, the feature has begun rolling out today and will be available for all across the web, mobile, and desktop apps regardless of pricing tier. Previously, if you wanted to reply to a message in a channel, you’d have to @mention them and have it interrupt the main conversation. In doing so, it throws everything out of order and others will find it difficult to follow the train of thought. Now all you have to do is select the “start a thread” option from the same menu where you’d add a reaction. Then, type in your message in the pane that appears and that’s it. The original message in the channel will be denoted with a label saying there’s a reply and also who is participating in that side conversation. Replies in the thread are arranged chronologically, not sorted based on relevance to the user. Slack’s core product lead Paul Rosania explained it was done out of an abundance of caution so you don’t miss out on something. Anyone can follow a thread and notifications are given to the original poster and those who reply, get tagged, or voluntarily subscribe to know more. If it becomes too much, you can easily unfollow a thread. Above: How Slack threaded replies work. Image Credit: Slack Sometimes you may want to share pertinent replies back into the main channel, so threaded replies has an option where you can take any reply and publish it back. If you’re conversing within a design channel, for example, and elect to have a side discussion about the latest layout, you might want to tell everyone what the ultimate decision is. With the “also send to #channel” element, the reply along with a summary of the original post will be published back into the respective channel. In the left sidebar where all your channels are featured is where you’ll find a new notification link that will show you all the replies related to you. Slack limits one reply thread per message, but you can have multiple replies in a channel. Everything will also be searchable. Developers can also tap into this new product offering with an updated API. This means that third-party integrations and bots can work in the sidebar pane. Easier said than done The feature is certainly not unique to Slack, but according to the company’s vice president of product April Underwood, it’s one that hasn’t really been solved in the context of work. “In a world where it’s mission critical for people to take advantage of the transparency of Slack and learn about what’s going on in a channel, but have the flexibility to take some conversations over to the side and tuck them out of the main flow of conversation, you really introduce some complexities that haven’t been solved before,” she said. For nearly two years, Slack says it’s been working on the right way to implement threaded replies. It counters that launching this feature was easy to do. “This is a big feature for Slack and we took a lot of time to get it just right,” remarked Joshua Goldenberg, the company’s head of design. “Over many iterations, there were a total of 7 designers, 2 user researchers, 1 [CEO] Stewart Butterfield, lots of [product managers], engineers, and [quality assurance testers] that worked on this.” Above: Slack Threads features a section where you can see all the side conversations you follow. Image Credit: Slack The company waged an internal discussion about whether threads should be in-line, inside the channel, or where it currently stands: part of the sidebar. Many similar tools have a more traditional setting that’s inside the channel and in-line. But Slack studied its users and discovered that the preference was more in the sidebar. While highly requested, Goldenberg’s team looked at what exactly people wanted and what the needs and workflows around the underlying request were. “It’s easy to build something that people request, but it’s important to build what people actually need,” he said. Slack sought to highlight the craftsmanship it takes around the productivity app as another reason why it didn’t release threaded replies years ago. The company views them as side conversations, similar to the ones we have in real life, and these should not really interfere with the normal, everyday group conversations. “Threads are more special because they fundamentally change how Slack works,” Goldenberg claimed. “When we work on something so central to the experience, it demands exceptional care and attention.” With threaded replies, teams don’t need to move conversations into private messaging, which is not indexed by the search engine. Now, there’s a side room available for discussion. Targeting larger teams Above: Slack’s daily active users growth. Image Credit: Slack More than 4 million people use Slack every day, which is certainly beyond simply being a productivity app for small businesses and startups. Now we’re starting to see larger teams use it. With more than 1.25 million paying users, more conversations are likely, which is why threaded replies are needed. Think about it: In real life, you’ll have a group discussion that drastically deviates to random or tangential topics. How often have you heard the moderator say “Take this offline”? This is exactly what Slack wants to do with threaded replies. “More companies are communicating with each other on Slack. People are creating channels within their Slack teams to communicate with vendors, partners, and employees. They’ve done ad projects where they’re sending feedback, comps, etc. to agencies enabling them to move faster than traditional email. We’re starting to see this use case become prevalent. It’s great for companies because it’s not clogging up inboxes and it’s getting [information] into the right channels to the right people,” the company’s former chief marketing officer Bill Macaitis once told VentureBeat. For Goldenberg and Underwood, this feature is "an incredibly important feature" and one that underscores the impact Slack has on the workplace across businesses of all sizes. "We have graduated beyond smaller teams using Slack. As we graduate to larger deployments in many of the Fortune 100 customers using Slack, as we see more businesses of every size around the world using Slack, we have to look at some of the features that map to how people use [it] to get work done," Underwood said. Introducing this feature isn’t a shock since there have been rumors for months about when it would launch. In April, Butterfield said Slack had been prototyping “various forms of threaded messaging internally for months” — something that the company’s head of user research Christina Holsberry Janzer, echoed during a demo of the new feature. Butterfield remarked at the time that threaded messaging “should hopefully arrive” later in 2016. Well, he was a bit off on the timing. Above: Slack has been working on a threaded comments feature since at least 2015. Image Credit: Screenshot If you’re thinking of Slack as merely a chat app, the company begs to disagree. “Slack is not a chat tool. It’s not a place to have quick real-time communication,” Underwood claimed. “It’s a place where people are producing real work product. They’re collaborating around it. They’re creating an archive which anyone can plug into when they join the company. It’s really critical for us to tackle problems that haven’t needed to be solved before. Threads is absolutely in the top couple of features that we’ve launched in the last few years in terms of the type of uses for Slack and chipping away at one of the good problems to have: As people use Slack more, they run into challenges of information overload.” Threaded replies are aimed at simplifying channels that become increasingly cluttered with conversations of all sorts. With such high expectations, it’ll be worth looking to see how well the feature is received and whether this new way of having side discussions resonates better than you’d expect from a traditional productivity app.

Former Techland COO starts a new game studio in Poland Posted: 18 Jan 2017 09:20 AM PST Strange New Things, a game development studio based in Wroclaw, Poland, announced its opening today. Pawel Zawodny, the former chief operating  officer of Techland, formed the company. Techland is the Poland-based studio responsible for the open-world zombie game Dying Light. The developer has other former employees from Techland, as well as some from The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, which is also based in Poland, and IO Interactive, the Denmark-based Square Enix subsidiary responsible for the Hitman stealth/assassination series. "Every member of the team had worked on major titles throughout their career. Dying Light, Hitman, The Witcher series, Dead Island, Call of Juarez series — they are just some of the titles we were heavily involved in" said Zawodnyin a press release sent to GamesBeat. "We have producers, artists, writers, programmers, level designers, and other people who had major impact on those triple-A productions. After decades of creating titles that were dictated by so-called market demand, we've all reached a point when we decided to do something different — something that comes from us.” “When we decided to set-up our studio, we told ourselves that we will create games that resonate with us — not big-budget blockbusters, but ambitious projects that delve into subject matters that haven't been discussed in triple-A games." said Krzysztof Nosek, the producer and co-founder of Strange New Things, in the press release. "We have experience in making triple-A-quality titles. However, it's the narratives, the themes, and subject matters that triple-A studios are reluctant to touch is what we want to explore — that's the area that excites us." Strange New Things has launched a site, which the developer teases includes hints of its first game.

Mozilla unveils new logo, font, and design Posted: 18 Jan 2017 09:15 AM PST Mozilla today revamped its “brand identity”: a new logo, font, color palette, language architecture, and imagery. This is the first time the company, first founded in February 1998, has done such thorough brand refresh. The project began in June 2016 as an open source design process that asked the public to submit and vote on different designs. The goal was to ensure the company’s purpose (championing a healthy internet) was better understood by more people — given that Mozilla is a not-for-profit organization that builds products, technologies, and programs to keep the internet open and growing. Here is the company’s explanation of the new design, which was developed in collaboration with its London-based partner Johnson Banks: We want to be known as the champions for a healthy Internet. An Internet where we are all free to explore and discover and create and innovate without barriers or limitations. Where power is in the hands of many, not held by few. An Internet where our safety, security and identity are respected. Today, we believe these principles matter more than ever. And as a not-for-profit organization, we’re uniquely able to build products, technologies, and programs that keep the Internet growing and healthy, with individuals informed and in control of their online lives. The biggest change is of course the logo (see the old one here). The biggest standout is the inclusion of “://” in place of “ill” to emphasize the company’s ties to the internet. Mozilla says it is “committed to the original intent of the link as the beginning of an unfiltered, unmediated experience into the rich content of the internet.” Its color palette is derived from the highlight colors used by Firefox and other browsers. The new font, called Zilla, is free and open to all. It was created by Typotheque, a historic Mozilla partner that was the first type foundry to release web-based fonts. Mozilla chose Typotheque because of the firm’s “deep knowledge of localization of fonts, and our commitment to having a font that includes languages beyond English.” The font is meant to evoke the Courier font used as the original default in coding as well as a journalistic feel that reinforces Mozilla’s commitment to participate in conversations about key issues of internet health. Mozilla also focused on the copy lines to the right or below its logo, which hold core messages or general program, event, and team names. The company wants this system to enable its various volunteer communities to create their own identity by selecting color and choosing imagery. Speaking of, the company decided that the concept of one image or icon standing for the whole of Mozilla, and the entirety of the Internet, was anachronistic. Mozilla thus chose to use dynamic imagery so that its identity “can evolve with the Internet itself.” To do this, Mozilla plans to invite artists, designers, and technologists to build out an imagery collective. From there, the company will curate animations and still images available under Creative Commons. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a new design and logo that doesn’t immediately scream redesign for the sake of redesign. Then again, Mozilla spent seven months engaging with its community to dream up this new look — well worth the effort.

Microsoft’s LinkedIn open-sources Bluepill for testing iOS apps Posted: 18 Jan 2017 09:00 AM PST LinkedIn is announcing today that it has open-sourced a piece of software it uses to run multiple tests for iOS apps before deploying updates to apps. The Bluepill code, which is written in Objective-C, is now available on GitHub under a BSD-2 Clause license. The need for a smarter tool derives from the fact that Apple’s Xcode integrated development environment (IDE) for building iOS apps only allows developers to run one instance of the Simulator tool at a time. And LinkedIn has about 2,000 user interface (UI) tests to make sure everything in its core app works properly. If you want to run a bunch of tests quickly — a common goal at companies with lots of developers who are constantly committing changes — then you’re going to need a lot of Macs, which is complicated. Facebook has come up with a system to solve this problem — called Xctool — but LinkedIn engineers found that a Python wrapper they built for it didn’t perfectly meet their needs. For one thing, the Xctool library is no longer maintained. But also “the Python wrapper was built on top of the xctool binary and it didn't have access to the CoreSimulator APIs,” LinkedIn staff software engineer Keqiu Hu wrote in a blog post. “Managing simulators was difficult, since we couldn't talk to the simulators directly.” Above: Bluepill in action. Image Credit: LinkedIn LinkedIn has open-sourced its software many times before, as have other web companies, like Facebook and Google. Other LinkedIn open-source tools include Ambry, FeatureFu, Pinot, and WhereHows. Microsoft, which offers many iOS apps and maintains several open-source projects, acquired LinkedIn last year.

Microsoft will double its AI R&D group in Montreal Posted: 18 Jan 2017 08:52 AM PST In conjunction with the Davos conference in Switzerland today, Microsoft announced plans to, in the next two years, double the size of its artificial intelligence (AI) research and development group in Montreal, which it established through the very recent acquisition of startup Maluuba. “Microsoft is excited to engage with faculties, students and the broader tech community in Montreal, which is becoming a global hub for AI research and innovation,” Microsoft president Brad Smith said at Davos, according to a blog post from Janet Kennedy, president of Microsoft Canada. Google, which has also acquired AI startups and has employed AI researchers internally for years right alongside Microsoft, formed an AI research group in Montreal just two months ago. Both Google and Microsoft have forged connections with Yoshua Bengio, a luminary in the AI field of deep learning, a subsector of AI that involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data and then getting them to make inferences about new data. Microsoft recently backed AI-oriented startup accelerator Element AI, of which Bengio is a cofounder. Facebook hired another luminary, Yann LeCun, to run its AI research lab in 2013, and Google picked up a different one, Geoff Hinton, through the 2013 acquisition of DNNresearch. The other top figure, Andrew Ng, previously headed up the Google Brain AI project but decamped to Chinese search company Baidu in 2014. On top of its AI expansion in Montreal, Microsoft says it will additionally make “gifts” to pay for AI research in the amounts of $6 million Canadian ($4.56 million USD) to the Université de Montréal and $1 million Canadian (around $760,000 USD) to McGill University.

PAX South will host NGE’s Overwatch Winter Premiere Live Finals Posted: 18 Jan 2017 08:16 AM PST Overwatch is bringing its team-based shooting to the next PAX. Next Generation Esports (NGE) announced today that it is partnering with Twitch to bring the finals for its Overwatch Winter Premiere league to the first two days of PAX South, January 27 and January 28. PAX South is a gaming convention taking place in San Antonio, Texas. It includes the Pax Arena, which focuses on esports like Overwatch. Four teams at PAX South will compete for a $100,000 prize pool in Overwatch’s team-based competition. The event will stream live on Twitch here. Overwatch came out last May, and it has already become one of the most popular games in the esports market, which generates $493 million in revenues annually. “The Winter Premiere was designed to highlight the best talent of Overwatch in North America,” said Vander Woude, NGE co-founder and chief executive officer, in a press release sent to GamesBeat. “It's only fitting to bring these all-star teams to the PAX Arena stage, where their effort and talent can be celebrated by an even wider audience." Blizzard is creating its own Overwatch League, but NGE is an independent organization. Even as Blizzard takes a direct approach in building Overwatch’s esports future, third-party event organizers will continue to run their own events centered around the game.

Sensor Tower: Q4 game revenues grew 70%, downloads up 33% Posted: 18 Jan 2017 07:30 AM PST EXCLUSIVE: Mobile game revenues grew 70 percent in the fourth quarter to $7.5 billion, compared to $4.4 billion a year earlier, according to mobile measurement firm Sensor Tower. iOS revenue grew 62 percent to $4.4 billion in Q4 from $2.7 billion in the same period a year earlier. Google Play revenue grew even faster to $3.1 billion, up 84 percent from $1.7 billion a year earlier. Altogether, mobile games were 80 percent of revenue in Q4 on Apple’s App Store and 90 percent of Google Play revenue. When viewed alongside rival market research App Annie’s year-end results, the Sensor Tower data fills in another part of the picture about mobile games in 2016. Above: Total mobile game revenues in 2016 grew 70 percent. Image Credit: Sensor Tower Worldwide mobile game downloads across both stores totaled approximately 8.2 billion in Q4 2016, an increase of about 33 percent from Q4 2015's 6.1 billion downloads. For all of 2016, new mobile game installs on the App Store and Google Play totaled more than 31 billion worldwide. Pokémon Go had the biggest launch of any mobile game in history. “It rode this fervor all the way to become 2016's most-downloaded game with hundreds of millions of installs across both platforms,” said Randy Nelson, head of mobile insights at Sensor Tower. Above: Top mobile games by downloads in 2016. Image Credit: Sensor Tower Super Mario Run saw more than 25 million installs in record time on iOS. Other viral titles included Slither.io, Color Switch, and Clash Royale. In China, two hot titles were King of Glory and Snake Off. Above: Sensor Tower’s stats on the top mobile game revenue producers of 2016. Image Credit: Sensor Tower For the full year, Mixi’s Monster Strike was the No. 1 game worldwide for the combined iOS and Google Play app stores, and it was also No. 1 in revenue on iOS and No. 1 on Google Play. Supercell’s Clash of Clans was No. 2, and MZ’s Game of War: Fire Age was No. 3. While Pokémon Go was the top new game in revenues in 2016, it was actually ranked No. 5 in total game revenues, behind four other games that were launched before 2016. GungHo Online Entertainment's Puzzle & Dragons and King's original Candy Crush Saga ranked in all three top 10 revenue lists again this year, while new to this elite group of top earning apps were the aforementioned Pokémon Go along with fellow newcomers Clash Royale (Supercell) and Mobile Strike (MZ), and Fate/Grand Order (Sony/Aniplex). Nintendo's first mobile game, Super Mario Run, eclipsed even Pokémon Go in terms of first-day downloads when it arrived on December 15. What's more impressive is that it was the No. 1 overall game for downloads while being available on only one of the two largest app stores (Apple's). New downloads of Pokémon Go continued to be strong throughout the fourth quarter as it launched in more new countries, while Electronic Arts scored a spot in the top five overall thanks to its remake of FIFA Mobile Soccer. Above: Monster Strike led Q4 revenues on all the charts. Image Credit: Sensor Tower Mixi's Monster Strike came in at No. 1 in Q4 across the overall and per-store rankings, as players in Japan continued to heavily monetize in the exceptionally popular game. Its closest rival overall, MZ's Mobile Strike, was launched in late 2015 and spent 2016 steadily climbing the revenue charts on both platforms to become a regular member of the top 10 highest earning apps. Supercell's Clash Royale proved to be an excellently monetized offering for the publisher early on. And Pokémon Go saw revenue rise again after it introduced its first special event during Halloween. Outside of these globally well-known titles, Sony/Aniplex's Fate/Grand Order made a huge debut on Japan's top grossing charts, leading to its inclusion in all three revenue top 10s for the quarter. NetEase's Onmyouji also saw strong Q4 revenue, particularly on iOS, which earned it a spot at No. 9 overall for the quarter.

Vimeo rolls out tools that let reviewers provide time-coded feedback and notes on individual frames Posted: 18 Jan 2017 07:01 AM PST Video-streaming company Vimeo is introducing a suite of video review tools today, designed to help creators garner feedback and collaborate on projects. Open to Vimeo Pro and Business subscribers, the tools enable users to privately share videos with reviewers, who can then leave time-coded feedback directly in the video. Reviewers can be anyone of a creator’s choosing, from a community of selected fans to a single marketing manager. Shareable review pages can be generated from the edit window in any video, with reviewers able to click on single frames to leave a note. Alternatively, they can simply type their note and add a time code to indicate which part of the video they’re referencing. Real-time conversations can take place by the side of a video and can include anyone, anywhere in the world. Above: Vimeo: Video Review Founded in 2004, Vimeo is often compared to YouTube insofar as anyone can use it to upload videos to share with the world. But the New York-based company has long pushed to differentiate itself by targeting creatives — in 2013, it launched its own paid on-demand service that lets anyone sell TV shows and movies directly to viewers. And last year, Vimeo drew in developers with a new white-listed API program that lets third parties integrate more deeply with Vimeo's video-streaming platform. In addition to the free Vimeo plan that comes with a number of restrictions, the company offers Vimeo Plus for $5 per month, Vimeo Pro for $17 per month, and a new Vimeo Business plan that launched late last year for $50 per month that offers hosting, marketing, analytics, and more. The new review and collaboration tools represent part of a bigger effort from Vimeo to appeal to the creator realm in 2017. “Today's launch is an exciting step forward in our efforts to build an end-to-end workflow solution for video professionals," said Anjali Sud, general manager and senior vice president for Vimeo’s creator platform. “Instead of managing endless email chains or paying for costly collaboration software, creators can now incorporate review seamlessly into their workflow as part of their Vimeo Pro and business membership, for no additional fees.”

DocuSign hires former Responsys head Daniel Springer as its new CEO Posted: 18 Jan 2017 07:00 AM PST DocuSign’s search for a successor to chief executive Keith Krach is over, more than a year after it started. The company announced today that it has hired former Responsys CEO and chairman Daniel Springer to lead the company. Springer plans to expand DocuSign’s leadership role within the digital transactional management space and guide the company to an eventual public offering. The announcement ends a rather long courtship that started in the summer of 2015 when an executive recruiter reached out to Springer about working at DocuSign. Springer declined because he had just left cross-channel marketing automation platform Responsys, after it was acquired by Oracle, and he wanted to spend time with his family. Then, last November, DocuSign reapproached Springer, who signed a contract before Christmas. He considered his time leading Responsys as a "perfect warm up" to running DocuSign, explaining that the processes around scaling a business, taking it public, and finding it a home were "great training and experience." But the difference for Springer is that while Responsys "did shape a category, DocuSign really built its own category," and this is what he wants to pursue as CEO. Some areas of interest include opportunities around payments, where you’re able to provide secure transactions after signing documents, such as for partnerships, contracts, or housing leases. In addition, Springer wants to accelerate DocuSign’s international expansion, doubling down on markets like Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Europe. Springer’s vision is to "own the category" of digital transaction management. "I want to build a very significant, independent company." This could also mean eventually going public — he shared that an IPO is in the cards but said that no specific timeline exists. "I’ve spent a lot of time looking at DocuSign and determining what will have to happen to make it public-ready," Springer said. "From my assessment, there’s nothing that stands in the way of DocuSign being a public company. [We have] significant business, growth, and we feel that it’s more than adequate to go public….Another big bucket is having a team in place that you feel confident in operating in the public market. The management team is very strong in scaling this business. I feel the boxes are all checked, and now it’s about figuring out the right timing." DocuSign began its search for a new CEO when Krach announced he was stepping down in 2015 after eight years at the helm. Last March, the company was all set to announce a new chief, but that unnamed candidate — believed to be Rick Osterloh — opted out at the last minute. DocuSign said in a statement: The objective of our built-to-last succession plan is to attract the highest caliber talent, and purposely we never set a timeline for the decision. All of the individuals interviewed were outstanding – and this candidate was among the best of the best. Once he announced plans to leave his current role, another company with unlimited resources approached him with an offer. After careful consideration, he chose to join the other company. Analysts and pundits had weighed in on possible successors to Krach. The list includes Enrique Salem, board member, former Symantec CEO, and Bain Capital Ventures managing director. Now, 10 months later, Springer has been hired and Krach has assumed the sole role of chairman. Springer admits that there were questions about the company’s performance after the last candidate dropped out, but based on conversations with board members and others at DocuSign he sensed that "it’s a quality group." He plans to work alongside Krach to further DocuSign’s growth. Springer explained that Krach will be working more in the boardroom than in the field but will be used "aggressively" to support the company’s business growth objectives. "I’m feeling super aligned with Keith on that front," he said. "After our comprehensive CEO search, I am confident that Dan is the right leader to continue our hyper growth, further strengthen our preeminence in the market, and further inspire the innovative, entrepreneurial, values-based culture of DocuSign," Krach said in a statement. The lengthy process of selecting a CEO has resulted in some internal issues at DocuSign. According to Bloomberg, as the search dragged on, four of the nine top executives departed the company, including two senior vice presidents. Krach has promised he’ll remain chairman for at least the next three years now that Springer is on board.

Voyager Capital selects IVP’s James Newell as new partner Posted: 18 Jan 2017 07:00 AM PST Voyager Capital today announced the hiring of a new partner, bringing on board former Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) executive James Newell. In this role, he’ll be tasked with making investments in Seattle-based startups and those focusing on artificial intelligence, security, and software-as-a-service (SaaS). A long-time employee with IVP, Newell has spent seven years in various roles working on deal flow and execution and assisting the firm’s various portfolio companies. In his most recent stint, he served as vice president working on investments in companies like Kayak, Carbonite, LegalZoom, SoFi, Checkr, and others. While the opportunity at Voyager Capital may be viewed as a step up, it’s also giving Newell an excuse to return to the place where he grew up: Seattle. Voyager Capital has been around since 1997 and focuses on startups in the Pacific Northwest and California. It currently has $420 million under management and invests in enterprise software, infrastructure, and big data applications. "Voyager fundamentally believes that early stage companies in the Northwest are best served by a local venture firm as their first institutional partner," Newell said in an interview with VentureBeat. "How would a Bay Area [venture capitalist] know the best tech executives in Seattle or Portland? How can they help you navigate the inner workings of a complex organization such as Amazon?" Newell believes his investor experience and board experience gleaned from his time at IVP will beneficially impact Voyager’s portfolio companies. In addition, his time working with later stage startups "should help our pattern matching at the early stage as we look for companies that can build tremendous scale.” He added, “given that I’m originally from Seattle, but spent more than a decade in the Valley, I can bring a complementary network to the firm while fitting nicely into the Northwest ecosystem." He describes the current ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest as blossoming, largely propelled by the likes of Microsoft and Amazon. Seattle has become "quite literally the center of the cloud universe," thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, while also being home to large public companies such as Expedia, Zillow, Tableau, and F5. "While the Bay Area has traditionally been known as the center of the technology ecosystem, it is obvious that great companies can be built outside of Silicon Valley. Seattle is one of those markets," said Newell. "The Voyager team has created a tremendous practice, and I'm excited to help them accelerate success in this market." Updated as of 11:00 a.m. Pacific on Wednesday: Clarified that Newell was hired as a partner, not a venture partner.

Proof lands $2 million to explain the cause and effect of your marketing spend Posted: 18 Jan 2017 07:00 AM PST EXCLUSIVE: Being a marketer in 2017 is hard. You entered the role with rose-tinted glasses, thinking it would be full of creative ideas and life-changing campaigns, only to discover that it is really about managing technology and proving everything you do is making the company more than you spend. And with that pressure to deliver measureable results, it is no wonder there are over 800 vendors in the marketing analytics marketplace. Today, Proof — a B2B marketing analytics tool — has raised $2 million in funding to help provide marketers with the answers they need. It already stands out from the crowd thanks to two key factors — how it was developed and funded and the way it measures results. Proof was born from the frustrations and pressures of today’s marketing role while working with the likes of HP, Honeywell, and BMC Software. “As a CMO and CCO I was constantly under pressure to improve impact,” Mark Stouse, CEO and cofounder at Proof, told me. “When you can’t show that effect, you lose funding, or at the very least you don’t get extra money to spend on the campaigns you are passionate about.” Or, commonly, you lose your job altogether. The idea of Proof is simple. It shows B2B managers the results of their marketing expenditure. But the measurement, algorithms, and mathematics behind the scenes are more complex. It goes beyond many of the existing modeling approaches — which tend to rely on sometimes subjective, very occasionally more scientific weighting of channels and touch points — to accurately compute marketing attribution. You won’t find any common last or first-touch attribution here. Proof takes into account time lag, cause and effect, and the ripple effect of your entire array of marketing activities over extended periods of time. Proof’s unique Correlation Engine offers results that explain the impact marketing campaigns, and other business factors, are having on sales, employee retention, customer awareness, and other key performance indicators, even when causes and their effects are months apart from each other. And the company has taken a unique approach to the development of the tool too. While the attribution model was created by Stouse and his team, it has been honed by executives at major B2B organizations. In essence, Proof has become powered by the wisdom of crowds. Interestingly, that same approach has been taken in securing today’s $2 million funding round. “There are a lot of great VCs out there,” Stouse said. “We chose a different path to raise funds. We wanted to work with the people that helped co-create the tool, a process that has worked extremely well for us.” This model has allowed Proof to achieve a great deal with a smaller-than-usual team. “We were trying to develop a lean startup,” Stouse said. “We created a product delivery team made up of major corporate CTOs who were able to invest time to work on this product for options. Many of those involved believe so much in what we’ve built that they have activated their options as part of this round.” Of course, that could mean almost anything. Options are not exactly a standard unit of measurement, but Stouse is transparent about the way Proof has created its equity share plan. “There is one class of stock in Proof, and everyone has that same class,” Stouse said. “There’s no artificial control in place, and I think that is very attractive to a lot of the people involved — experienced investors in technology — and they want to be a part of that.” As a result, Proof has a broad base of shareholders, including The Scibetta Fund, Vaulting Ventures, High West Venture Partners, Lewis Family Enterprises, LDWW Group, KRB Ventures, Webonise Labs, and an array of both current and former senior business leaders from organizations such as Accenture, BMC Software, Concur Technologies, Edelman, Hill & Knowlton, Honeywell, HP, IBM, Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft, Oracle, ServiceNow, Starbucks, and WE Communications. While Stouse’s approach to B2B marketing analytics and attribution dates back to 2005, Proof was founded in 2015 in New York. The product launched in December 2016, and this round of funding will be used to drive further research and development, as well as support for product marketing and sales. Proof is available now both as a Software-Enabled Service (SeS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Sign up for Funding Daily: Get the latest news in your inbox every weekday.

Joonko’s newest product aims to remove unconscious bias at work Posted: 18 Jan 2017 07:00 AM PST We all have biases, whether they are conscious or unconscious. But when these biases start impacting our decisions in the workplace, it becomes a problem. Joonko, an Atlanta-based startup that is relocating to San Francisco, wants to change all that. The startup announced today that it is launching a second version of its software, specifically for managers who want to ensure greater inclusion within their teams. "We got approached by sales managers from companies we aren't currently working with who want to use our software for their teams," said cofounder and chief executive Ilit Raz in an interview with VentureBeat. Founded in 2016, the Techstars Atlanta graduate launched an artificial intelligence-powered software last year that plugs into companies' existing platforms, such as Atlassian Jira, Salesforce, and Workday. The idea, according to Raz, is to rifle through a given company’s existing data in order to suggest real-time corrective action that can reduce discrimination at work. "One interesting thing that we see in the industry is what people think when women return from maternity leave,” said Raz. “They often anticipate their performance will be lower, when in fact research shows that they are at their highest productivity." Pricing is still relatively low, with tiers for companies and individuals. For companies, it ranges between $25 and $35 per job, to ensure diversity in recruiting. For team inclusion, it ranges between $3 to $6 per employee per month. For individual use and coaching, the price range is $3 to $9 a month. When Joonko does sell to a company, Raz explained that no extra work is required on the company's end. "Basically, we are connecting to platforms that the company is already using and analyzing data that already exists," she said. So far, there are 11 companies that are testing the software in pilot stage, but the startup declined to identify them. "Companies know that there is a problem but can't really put their fingers on what that problem is." As an example, Joonko will look at employee records to determine whether they have been working productively, and if so, whether they are given the right tasks and offered the right opportunities. The startup also helps with hiring processes. It would have been interesting to see Joonko collaborate with neuroscientists, psychoanalysts, or cognitive behavioralists to try and understand the deeper layers and processes of the unconscious. However, like many startups today, Joonko is betting on the sole power of AI. The company has raised a total of $300,000 in seed funding — $120,000 from Techstars and $180,000 from angel investors. It has six employees today (three full-time and three part-time). For now, the team is focusing on gender and minorities, but it intends to expand to include other profiles that are prone to discrimination, including factors like age and religion. That last is particularly interesting, as Raz, who is Israeli, has her research and development base in Israel. When asked whether her software could help reduce discrimination between Jews and Muslims at work, she answered very honestly: "Unfortunately, I don't think Israel is as open-minded as the U.S. about these issues. But hopefully, they will start using our software and set an example." Diversity and inclusion have been hot topics for a while now in Silicon Valley. But since the Ellen Pao case in 2015, these issues have been catapulted to the top of tech companies’ priority lists, with Google for Entrepreneurs powering an annual Tech for Inclusion Summit, for example. It's getting harder and harder for companies to ignore claims about lack of diversity and inclusion. Last year, Intel announced that 43.4 percent of its new hires in the first half of 2016 were either women or underrepresented minorities. In September, Salesforce announced that it was hiring its first chief equality officer, former Microsoft executive Tony Prophet. Disclosing diversity reports is a must now. So tech leaders are consciously trying to remove any form of unconscious bias. But with a new president being sworn into office this Friday, things might not evolve so smoothly, especially when some tech leaders have decided to side with the new administration. Maybe President-elect Donald Trump should look into a Joonko subscription for the White House?

Football legend Joe Montana invests $250,000 in Blend’s Genie bots Posted: 18 Jan 2017 07:00 AM PST NFL Hall of Famer and former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana announced a $250,000 investment in Blend today. The chat app and bot platform will use the funding to create additional chatbots, called Genies. The company plans to create 1,000 bots by the end of the year. “I'm very excited about Blend's push into the NFL; the potential for franchise engagement is exponential,” Montana said in a statement shared with VentureBeat. The investment from Montana comes in the same week as Blend is launching Genies for each of the 32 teams in the NFL in a section of the mobile app titled “Locker Room Talk.” Genies were first made available on Blend last fall and deliver trending news stories and social media content to chat groups. Blend currently has one million monthly active users and hosts more than 180 different Genies, like Donald Trump, Rihanna, and Aria, a PornHub chatbot. Last month, Blend opened its API for developers to create their own Genies. Blend was created in 2012 and has raised more than $10 million from investors like NEA, CAA Ventures, and Foundation Capital. The company has 30 employees and is based in San Francisco. Sign up for Funding Daily: Get the latest news in your inbox every weekday.

OpenView Invests $25M Series A in Deputy to Redefine Workforce Management Posted: 18 Jan 2017 06:36 AM PST PRESS RELEASE: Funding Marks Firm’s Largest Single Investment ATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–January 18, 2017– Deputy, the leading global workforce management solution provider, today announced it has received $25M in Series A financing from OpenView. This funding marks the company’s first from an institutional investor in its eight year history and will be used to rapidly grow Deputy’s team across offices in Atlanta, Sydney, Los Angeles, the United Kingdom and the Philippines. Daniel Demmer, a Managing Partner at OpenView and former President of Endeca, will join the board. “Our investment in Deputy marks the largest single investment OpenView has made in our decade-plus history,” said Demmer. “Co-founders Steve and Ashik and the Deputy team have built a truly extraordinary platform that automates a broken and manual workflow for hundreds of thousands of users around the world. We’re looking forward to working with the team and realizing Deputy’s further growth potential in the coming years.” Inspired by issues encountered running their previous business, founders Steve Shelley and Ashik Ahmed built Deputy to transform the archaic practice of employee time tracking and scheduling. The company now counts 28,000 businesses large and small as customers including Amazon, Qantas, Nike and NASA and gives users the ability to auto-optimize schedules by role, hours worked and more. Workers have been left frustrated with countless hours wasted and less-than-optimal work schedules created by legacy tools. Deputy provides a modern mobile and cloud-first answer to outdated scheduling systems, which for too long have left employees and managers to rely on complicated Excel spreadsheets, phone calls and texts to manage schedule and shift changes. “Shift workers comprise over half of the world’s labor force, yet the technology to serve these workers and their employers is unsuited for such a large and complicated task,” said Steve Shelley. “For the last eight years, we have grown our company from an idea to a full-fledged business. Now with the support of OpenView, a firm that wholly shares our mission of improving people’s working lives, we will be able to further transform the outdated practices of workforce management and scheduling.” “The hourly paid market grows at a rate of one million people per year in the U.S. alone and this is not about to slow down with casualization of the workforce, massive growth in hospitality, retail, senior living, on-demand services and other sectors,” said Ashik Ahmed, CEO of Deputy. “We are thrilled to partner with OpenView to further expand both our team and platform. Until now we’ve bootstrapped our way to rapid growth, but with OpenView’s support we’ll be able to scale the team efficiently to meet the needs of our global customer base.” Deputy is expanding around the globe. Learn more about open career opportunities here. About Deputy Founded in 2008, Deputy is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and Atlanta, U.S. with offices in Los Angeles, the United Kingdom and the Philippines. As the ultimate workforce manager, Deputy offers best-in-class technology in a cloud-based solution that simplifies scheduling, timesheets, tasking and other employee communication. Coupled with brilliant mobile apps and one-click payroll integration, Deputy equips business managers with the tools they need to get out of the back office and into the action. More than 28,000 customers in 73 countries use Deputy to manage their employees. For more information, visit Deputy.com and follow @DeputyApp. About OpenView OpenView, the expansion stage venture firm, helps build software companies into market leaders. Through our Expansion Platform, we help companies hire the best talent, acquire and retain the right customers and partner with industry leaders so they can dominate their markets. Our focus on the expansion stage makes us uniquely suited to provide truly tailored operational support to our portfolio companies. Learn more about OpenView at openviewpartners.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170118005255/en/ Treble Michael Kellner, 415-425-4773 deputy@treblepr.com

Sales CRM startup Pipedrive raises $17 million from Atomico and others Posted: 18 Jan 2017 06:25 AM PST Sales software startup Pipedrive has closed a $17 million Series B funding round led by Skype cofounder Niklas Zennström’s Atomico, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Rembrandt Venture Partners. Founded out of Tallinn, Estonia in 2010, Pipedrive serves up customer relationship management (CRM) software to help salespeople in small businesses plan their activities, track deals, and record conversation history. It also integrates with more than 50 third-party software products, including Trello, MailChimp, Google Apps, and Zapier. Above: Pipedrive The company claims to serve more than 30,000 small business customers globally, though it also has teams from big companies such as Amazon on its client base. It counts 200 employees in Tallinn and its headquarters, which is now based in New York. Prior to now, Pipedrive had raised around $14 million in VC funding, and its latest cash influx will allow it to develop its product, “grow its partner ecosystem, and scale customer growth” globally, according to a company statement. And grabbing Atomico as an investor is a major coup, as the London-based VC firm has some notable people at the helm, with some big brands in its portfolio, such as Skype, Supercell, Truecaller, Viagogo, Rdio, and Jawbone. "Partnership with Atomico is a huge victory for us, as they are one of the few VC firms whose partners have hands-on experience building multi-billion, global, and fast-growing technology companies," said Timo Rein, CEO and cofounder of Pipedrive. “Selling is hard no matter where you do business. This new partnership will enable us to fulfil our mission of helping salespeople around the world sell better, whether they live in NYC or a small town in Brazil." There is, of course, no shortage of CRM tools out there in the wild already, including heavyweights such as Salesforce, as well as well-established alternatives, including Insightly, Zoho CRM, Base, and Capsule. But Pipedrive promises a “refreshing alternative” to a market that’s laden with software “designed to control salespeople rather than help them succeed.” In real terms, Pipedrive pitches itself as a tool for the hourly and daily needs of salespeople working in small businesses. “Timo and his team at Pipedrive are building a company that is quickly becoming the CRM software of choice for small businesses, which will help millions of companies sell better in the future,” said Atomico’s Teddie Wardi. “While there are plenty of established CRM solutions for the enterprise market, CRM for SMBs is a largely untapped market and is worth over $10 billion. The majority of small businesses still use spreadsheets or even pen and paper to manage their sales, but Pipedrive simplifies the process and is built around the precise needs of a salesperson." As part of the deal,  Wardi will join Pipedrive's board, with Atomico founder and CEO Niklas Zennström joining as “board observer.” Sign up for Funding Daily: Get the latest news in your inbox every weekday.

Smart water bottle maker Gululu partners with Generosity.org to improve drinking water sources Posted: 18 Jan 2017 06:01 AM PST Smart water bottle maker Gululu has partnered with Generosity.org to improve drinking water sources around the globe. Gululu is a high-tech water bottle. It is designed to encourage kids to stay hydrated, mainly by inspiring them with game-like animations. Animated pets come to life as a child drinks water. Sensors in the hardware, together with educational and social software, enable the kid to care for their virtual pet, Tamagotchi-style. Over time, Gululu will introduce a new game and more 3D animations. Gululu first launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in May 2016. The company raised more than $200,000, or twice its funding target. It also launched a preorder campaign on Indiegogo in December and has accumulated preorders of $400,000. Starting today, for every Gululu bottle purchased, a child in a developing country will receive a clean drinking water source for life. The children and their families who will receive this do not already have access to clean water. Generosity.org’s goal is to build water wells for their villages with the proceeds from Gululu sales in the U.S. Gululu is available on Amazon for purchase. Above: Gululu and Generosity.org are teaming up to create new water sources for children in the developing world. Image Credit: Gululu Generosity.org is a humanitarian organization that is working to help end the clean water crisis in developing countries, one community at a time. The lack of clean water and sanitation causes 80 percent of all sickness and disease in the developing world — affecting more people than war, AIDS, and famine combined, the group said. Generosity.org's approach includes creating clean water drinking wells and providing education in developing countries, and the group works systematically to bring clean drinking water to more than 450,000 people in twenty countries. The nonprofit organization has funded 778 projects. Gululu has offices in Santa Clara, Calif. and Shanghai and has 20 employees. Alvin Chiang, founder and CEO of Gululu, was the former chief marketing officer of China’s Renren. “Our team is thrilled to be a part of the Amazon Exclusive program to deliver more Gululus to a wider audience and continue to perfect our product experience," said Chiang said in a statement. "Our partnership with Generosity.org is also an important endeavor that aligns with our vision of providing clean water and hydration to children everywhere."

MIT launches Play Labs to help AR, VR, and AI startups get off the ground Posted: 18 Jan 2017 06:00 AM PST Bayview Labs, Seraph Group, and MIT Game Lab are creating Play Labs to accelerate startups in augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. The accelerator is targeted at students and alumni of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The accelerator will offer funding, facilities, and mentorship resources for selected startups. Applications open now for the official program launch in summer 2017. The accelerator is targeting startups that use “playful” technologies. The first batch of companies will be selected from MIT students and alumni, and will run from June 2017 to August, 2017 on campus at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. The deadlines for applications is February 20. The program will be run by Bayview Labs and its executive director, Rizwan Virk, an MIT alum (MIT '92 BS Computer Science & Engineering) and a prolific Silicon Valley angel investor, advisor, and mentor, in conjunction with the Seraph Group, a seed stage venture capital investment firm founded by Tuff Yen. The MIT Game Lab and Ludus, the MIT Center for Games, Learning, and Playful Media, will host and conduct the educational program for MIT-related startup companies employing playful technology. Teams will be given workspace on the MIT campus for the duration of the program. Also participating is VR@MIT, a student organization on campus dedicated to fostering VR/AR/MR (mixed reality) entrepreneurship at MIT. The focus of the first batch will be VR and AR technologies and applications, though the incubator will also consider startups using other playful tech, including 3D modeling, rendering, streaming, gamification, artificial intelligence, and machine vision. The applications of playful technology can be in any industry, including online/mobile/VR gaming, esports, entertainment, education, healthcare, finance, and so on. During the program, startup teams will be mentored by Virk and by faculty and staff from the MIT Game Lab. Additional speakers and mentors for the accelerator will include many successful entrepreneurs and experts in product design, sales and marketing, and fundraising, drawn from MIT alumni and the Seraph Group. Startups that are accepted into Play Labs will each receive an initial investment of $20,000 from the Play Labs Fund in return for common stock. Startups that graduate from the program and meet certain criteria will be eligible for up to $80,000 in additional funding from Play Labs and its investment partners. Virk, the executive director of Play Labs, has been a cofounder, angel investor, and mentor to many successful startups using playful tech, including Gameview Studios (makers of Tap Fish, sold to DeNA), Funzio (sold to GREE), Tapjoy, Sliver.tv, and Telltale games. "MIT has been the starting point for many successful startups over the years," said Virk, in a statement. "Recently, a lot of focus for playful and gaming technologies, particularly VR/AR, has been on the West Coast, but I believe that the ecosystem around MIT in Boston has great talent and startup ideas in these areas." He added, “When I graduated from MIT and thought of doing my first startup, I wish I had this kind of accelerator program, with support from both MIT staff and industry entrepreneurs and mentors. That's why I designed the program in this way.”

China’s Innotech Capitals buys ad automation firm Ad-Juster Posted: 18 Jan 2017 05:59 AM PST Innotech Capitals, a Shanghai-based private equity group, has acquired advertising automation firm Ad-Juster as part of a plan to take the company global. San Diego, Calif.-based Ad-Juster automates manual processes for digital publishers, ad agencies, ad networks, and ad-tech platforms. The deal shows that consolidation in the ad tech market continues, with Chinese companies leading the way. Ad-Juster's 10 product-level technologies help its clients reconcile close to $10 billion worth of digital ad revenue every year. The company specializes in display ad reporting, third-party data aggregation, programmatic reporting, ad viewability, mobile and video reporting, third-party tag verification, automated buffer optimization, and more. Innotech Capitals is the investment arm of Innotech International Group. “Innotech International Group will provide Ad-Juster with the resources we need to accelerate our offering not only here in the U.S. but also internationally,” said Mike Lewis, president and cofounder of Ad-Juster, in a statement. “Having bootstrapped Ad-Juster from day one entirely from its own cash flow, the opportunity to transition what we do well to a broader audience is very exciting.” Ad-Juster will retain its current management team and operate under the business model and culture that have fueled the company's success. Terms of the acquisition will not be disclosed. "With our network and resources in international ad tech, Innotech International Group will quickly help Ad-Juster expand its unique offerings to global markets starting with China and the Asia Pacific region,” said Oliver Chen, founding partner of Innotech Capitals, in a statement. “The business will meet the growing need for automated operations and solutions around the world.” Founded in 2007, Ad-Juster simplifies the manually intensive processes associated with digital ad operations, which have gotten more complex. More than 120 brand name digital publishing companies use Ad-Juster, including over half of the comScore Top 50 publishers by impression volume. Since July 2015, Innotech Capitals has done deals exceeding $500 million, including acquisitions and exits. Innotech Capitals has acquired 12 portfolio companies in the U.S., Israel, U.K., and Canada.

Social Native gets authentic fans to create social media content for brands Posted: 18 Jan 2017 05:00 AM PST Social Native has created a marketplace for connecting brands with content creators who can create authentic social media assets that promote those brands. Above: Jeff Ragovin of Social Native Image Credit: Social Native The startup is positioned for the era known as the “creator economy,” a term coined by futurist Paul Saffo to describe our shift from consumers of content to creators of content. To help with that mission, the Los Angeles company has hired as executives two of its investors, Jeff Ragovin and Eytan Elbaz, who each have a long history in successful startups. Social Native is working with 50 top brands to find them low-cost and authentic content. In the age of social media, brands haven’t been able to keep up with the voracious demand for social media assets, such as videos or pictures, on all of the big social sites. “We are changing the way brands create content,” Elbaz said in an interview with VentureBeat. “The biggest shift that has occurred since the advent of social media is the amount of content people can consume is 100 times greater than it was decades ago. You can skim through Instagram and see much more in a minute than you do in an hour reading a magazine.” Social Native enlists the people who create an enormous amount of assets: the fans. Those fans currently don’t get paid for their authentic expressions of enthusiasm for a brand. Brands can express the kind of content they want, such as fans interacting with a new product. Social Native has identified 14 million of the top content creators in the world, and it has invited thousands of them to create content for social media campaigns. Social Native uses its algorithms to figure out which content creators are creating the right content for the campaign, and it shows that content to the brands. The brands pay Social Native for the assets, and Social Native shares that money with the content creators who express their love for the products. Elbaz, who is the co-creator of Google’s enormously profitable AdSense business (acquired for $104 million), said that brands that don’t keep up will lose mindshare in this new age of social media. “Social Native automates a lot of the processes for creating content,” he said. Above: Eytan Elbaz, chief strategy officer at Social Native Image Credit: Social Native Elbaz, who is chief strategy officer at Social Native, thinks that content creators can do in a week — at a fraction of the cost — the work that an agency does in a year creating assets for ad campaigns. An agency might charge $100 million for 100 campaigns. But content creators, who previously were doing their sharing for free, could be far less expensive and their content could be a lot better because it’s so authentic. "Jeff and Eytan joining the company as operators serves as a true testament to the power of our technology and growth opportunity ahead," said David Shadpour, CEO of Social Native, in a statement. "Both Jeff and Eytan have incredible track records of disrupting old standards with technology. Creative is one of the last industries to be merged with technology, and under their leadership we will take on the challenge of giving brands the ability to create personalized content on demand." Ragovin, cofounder of Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce for $745 million), said in an interview with VentureBeat, “I’ve seen them address a gaping hole in the demand for content. Brands are clamoring for this content.” Ragovin invested in Social Native in early 2016. He will now help the company with its aggressive growth plans. Of course, brands have been going to celebrities and influencers to get content. But that can be very expensive. And those celebrities and influencers aren’t always as passionate about brands as ordinary people, who represent “the long tail,” Ragovin said. “This is a disruptor in the content creation space,” he said. Influencers also use their own platforms to distribute content. With Social Native, the brands use their own platforms for distribution. Content creators are approved based on the quality of their content and how engaged they are with brands. They’re not approved based on the size of their followings. “Over time, the algorithms figure out who is worth what and compensate people appropriately,” Elbaz said. “There are a lot of signals we pay attention to. Part of the job of the tech is to find out where your passions lie.” Ragovin, a Social Native investor since early 2016, will play a part in developing the scalable and aggressive growth trajectory for Social Native. In his previous role as cofounder and chief strategy officer of Buddy Media, a SaaS platform for brands and agencies to organize and control their social marketing programs, Jeff played a central role in guiding the company from a startup into the largest enterprise social marketing suite in the world. As for the creator economy, Ragovin said, “We think creative services is a meaningful piece of this growing digital economy. It is a way to supplement income.” Elbaz added, “The whole goal is to drive toward true personalization. Personalization is the future of everything.” According to Social Native research, there are 396 human touch points required in the creative development process. The company automated this process and can now scale the creation of highly personalized, quality creative content. Polaroid has been using Social Native, and it now sources 71 percent of its social content from the company. Polaroid has used that content in social media, paid advertising, ecommerce pages, product packaging, and more. Elbaz was previously cofounder and chief strategy officer of Scopely, a fast-growing mobile game producer. In addition, Elbaz served as head of Google’s domain channel, where he grew the business from $13 million to $600 million annually over four years. Elbaz is also a founding member of Applied Semantics, where he conceived and designed AdSense, DomainPark, and DomainSense. “I’m a startup guy,” said Elbaz. “I love the beginning, and we have made a lot of great progress at Social Native.”

Seven Bridges Platform Goes Global: Now Live on AWS EU (Frankfurt) Region Posted: 18 Jan 2017 04:36 AM PST PRESS RELEASE: Provides Fast, Easy Way for Seven Bridges Users to Access and Analyze Data Generated in Europe, under the Protection of EU Data Protection Regulations CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–January 18, 2017– Seven Bridges, the biomedical data analysis company, today announced that the Seven Bridges Platform is now live on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) EU (Frankfurt) Region in Frankfurt, Germany, making it one of the first major cloud-based biomedical data analysis platforms to operate in both the U.S. and Europe. By further expanding the footprint of its powerful, cloud-based platform for biomedical data analysis on AWS, Seven Bridges is providing a faster and easier way for researchers to access and analyze data generated in Europe, and do so under the safeguards provided by Germany’s world-class data protection regime. Further, using data centers that are physically closer to researchers accelerates data transfers, making it easier for researchers to work with extremely large datasets. “These dual benefits – access to storage and computation that is physically closer to European R&D sites and the ability to keep data within the appropriate legal jurisdictions – are critical for global research enterprises,” said Seven Bridges Senior Vice President of Science and Product, Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, Ph.D. Data generated in the EU can be subject to European data protection regulations making transatlantic data transfer strictly regulated. Seven Bridges now offers a simpler and faster alternative to stay compliant by making the Seven Bridges Platform available on AWS in Frankfurt. With an account on Seven Bridges in Europe, users can work securely within the EU regulatory framework, and data are stored and processed in the EU. “AWS allows our partners and customers to retain complete control and ownership over their data, including the region in which the data is physically located, making it easy to meet regional compliance and data residency requirements,” said Brendan Bouffler, Manager of Research and Technical Computing, AWS. “By taking advantage of multiple AWS Regions, Seven Bridges is able to offer even more competitive services.” “As an established center for pharmaceutical R&D, Europe is home to state-of-the-art research projects generating vast amounts of genomic and other biomedical data,” said James Sietstra, President of Seven Bridges. “Our objective is to give our partners access to the tools they need to both work efficiently within existing regulatory frameworks and to collaborate across borders. The future of precision medicine demands technology and infrastructure that can keep pace with the demands of data growth and the reach of global research enterprises.” About Seven Bridges Seven Bridges is the biomedical data analysis company accelerating breakthroughs in genomics research for cancer, drug development and precision medicine. The scalable, cloud-based Seven Bridges Platform empowers rapid, collaborative analysis of millions of genomes in concert with other forms of biomedical data. Thousands of researchers in government, biotech, pharmaceutical and academic labs use Seven Bridges, including three of the largest genomics projects in the world: U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genomics Cloud pilot, the Million Veteran Program, and Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project. As the NIH’s only commercial Trusted Partner, Seven Bridges authenticates and authorizes access to one of the world’s largest cancer genomics dataset. Named one of the world’s smartest companies by MIT Technology Review, Seven Bridges has offices in Cambridge, Mass.; Belgrade; London; Istanbul; and San Francisco. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170118005236/en/ Seven Bridges Amanda Orr, +1-202-459-1304 media@sevenbridges.com or Laurie Gibson, +1-650-815-1438 media@sevenbridges.com

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